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I am at the planning stage of a web application that will be hosted in Azure with ASP.NET for the web site and Silverlight within the site for a rich user experience. Should I use Azure Tables or SQL Azure for storing my application data?
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Azure tables are only cheaper than SQL Azure if the data access pattern is relatively light, since tables have a per-transaction fee and SQL Azure doesn't.
Azure SQL Database fared better in a ranking of "Best cloud databases of 2021" by TechRadar, published in November 2020, where it's No. 1. DB-Engines uses a variety of means for its ranking, including the number of mentions on web sites, Google Trends, job offers and more, with the full methodology explained here.
Azure Table storage is a cloud-based NoSQL datastore you can use to store large amounts of structured, non-relational data. Azure Table offers a schemaless design, which enables you to store a collection of entities in one table. An entity contains a set of properties, and each property defines a name-value pair.
SQL virtual machines offer full administrative control over the SQL Server instance and underlying OS for migration to Azure. The most significant difference from SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance is that SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines allows full control over the database engine.
Azure Table Storage appears to be less expensive than SQL Azure. It is also more highly scalable than SQL Azure.
SQL Azure is easier to work with if you've been doing a lot of relational database work. If you were porting an application that was already using a SQL database, then moving it to SQL Azure would be the obvious choice, but that's the only situation where I would recommend it.
The main limitation on Azure Tables is the lack of secondary indexes. This was announced at PDC '09 and is currently listed as coming soon, but there hasn't been any time-frame announcement. (See http://windowsazure.uservoice.com/forums/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting/suggestions/396314-support-secondary-indexes?ref=title)
I've seen the proposed use of a hybrid system where you use table and blob storage for the bulk of your data, but use SQL Azure for indexes, searching and filtering. However, I haven't had a chance to try that solution yet myself.
Once the secondary indexes are added to table storage, it will essentially be a cloud based NoSQL system and will be much more useful than it is now.
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