I would like to introduce you to another two offerings. Both are based, just like the Azure SQL Database, on the Microsoft SQL Server Engine:

Azure SQL Data Warehouse: Azure SQL Data Warehouse is the cloud-based version of the SQL Server Data Warehouse and uses the same Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture as the on-premises version.

For processing within the MPP architecture, SQL Data Warehouse distributes your data in the background to many shared-nothing storage and processing units.

Azure Analysis Services: Azure Analysis Services is the cloud-based version of the SQL Server Analysis Services. There are, however, two differences which are as follows:

• You can scale up the processing workflow in the cloud as needed
• You can extend the processing workflow, for example, with your Azure Machine Learning solutions