What is the difference between Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools and Azure SQL Database Managed Instance?

Question

Azure SQL Database has two similar flavors - Managed Instance and Elastic pools. Both flavors enables placing multiple databases that share the same resources and in both cases can be changed cpu/storage for entire group of database within the instance/pool. What is the difference between them?

Answer 1

Azure SQL Database Elastic Pool is a shared resource model for Single Azure SQL PaaS databases to achieve higher resource utilization efficiency, and all the databases within an elastic pool share predefined resources within the same elastic pool. The emphasis of this offering is on a simplified database-scoped programming model for multi-tenant SaaS apps where the workload pattern is well defined and delivers high cost-effectiveness when serving many tenants.

SQL Database Managed Instance offers a simplified instance-scoped programming model that is like an on-premises SQL Server instance. The databases in Managed Instance share the resources allocated to the Managed Instance, and the Managed Instance also represents the management grouping for these databases. The emphasis of this offering is on high compatibility with the programming model of on-premises SQL Server and out-of-box support for the large majority of SQL Server features and accompanying tools/services.

Some high-level guidelines might be:

• Use Elastic pools if you need to group a large number of single database that don't need all instance Transact-SQL functionalities that exist in SQL Server.
• Use Managed Instance if you want to migrate a large number of SQL Server database that heavily use instance level features such as CLR, Service Broker, SQL Agent, etc.

See more info in Azure SQL IaaS vs PaaS Comparison Table