At the time of writing, there are three vCore service tiers for Azure SQL Database:
- General purpose: This tier provides scalable compute and storage options with IOPs up to 7,000 and 5-10 ms latency.
- Hyperscale: At the time of writing, this service tier is in preview, and it provides on-demand scalable storage with 200,000 IOPS and 1.2 ms latency for data and 7,000 IOPS, 5-10 ms latency for logs.
- Business critical: This tier is designed for high transaction rates and high resiliency with 200,000 IOPS and 1-2 ms latency. Moreover, it provides the option to have enhanced availability by spreading replicas across availability zones within one region.
For all the vCore service tiers, you can specify one of the two compute generations that are supported by Azure at present, according to your scenario:
- Gen4: Provides up to 24 cores and memory up to 168 GB
- Gen5: Provides up to 80 cores and memory up to 408 GB