Reitse Eskens continues a series on load testing. First up is Azure SQL Database General Purpose edition:
My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the Premium Edition; today I’m moving to the General Purpose Tier.
The GP tier comes in two flavours: regular and serverless. Serverless has only one hardware tier: Gen5. With provisioned, you can also select memory-optimised or confidential compute. In earlier tests, I never found significant differences between serverless and provisioned, so I skipped testing both SKUs. Given the nature of these tests, going memory-optimised didn’t seem to make much sense either. Also, I’ve never seen any other deployment than the regular Gen5 General Purpose database.
And then there’s Business Critical:
My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the General Purpose Edition, let’s move it up to the Business Critical Tier
The Business Critical tier comes in two flavours: General and confidential compute. For my testing, I’ve stuck with the General SKU. I haven’t seen confidential compute with customers, and it has very specific use cases: you want to protect your threads on the processor itself. A lot happens behind the scenes to make that work, and it costs more. There are scenarios where this makes sense, but not in my work. For example, using 8 cores for regular business-critical workloads costs about 3,650 euros each month. Confidential Compute will cost about 6,000 euros each month. So yeah, you need a use case for that.
Click through for results on each.