Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) vs. Microsoft SQL Server

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

288 Reviews and Ratings

Microsoft SQL Server

1,630 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Amazon RDS	Score8.7 out of 10	N/A	Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) from Amazon Web Services.	N/A
Microsoft SQL Server	Score8.8 out of 10	N/A	Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database.	$1,418 Per License

Pricing

Amazon RDS

Microsoft SQL Server

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL: $0.24 ($0.48)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MariaDB: $0.25 ($0.50)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MySQL: $0.29 ($0.58)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for Oracle: $0.482 ($0.964)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for SQL Server: $1.02 ($1.52)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)

Subscription: $1,418.00
Per License
Enterprise: $13,748.00
Per License

Pricing Offerings
Amazon RDS	Microsoft SQL Server
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Optional

No setup fee

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Community Pulse
Key User Insights
	Amazon RDS	Microsoft SQL Server
Considered Both Products	Amazon AWS KAUSHIK DEBNATH SAP BASIS Consultant in Information Technology at Bristlecone (Information Technology & Services, 501-1000 employees) Chose Amazon RDS we could use Azure SQL for our project but as our other parts of the solutions existed on AWS, it was a better choice to have AWS RDS or else traffic exiting AWS would have taken a lot of cloud changes. Microsoft SQL Server requires license, either core-based or full license … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon RDS We used to have On-Premises servers with Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL databases. We used that for years, and we had a hard time and a lot of work involved in securing and updating the server. And not no mention that growth involves a lot of calculations and extra costs. … Incentivized Helpful? Kyle Reichelt Senior Project Manager in Information Technology at OnMetric (Internet, 11-50 employees) Chose Amazon RDS The only direct comparison that I have professionally would be from a past life where we ran Microsoft SQL Server on Microsoft Servers, and while I served as a technical liaison between a vendor and my customers, there were constant issues within my customers' technical teams … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon RDS In a few words, we are just to confortable working with oracle and sql server. Using RDS add another layer of distributed database in order to backup everything we have in case of a disaster and also complies with authorities locally and internacionally. All database we use, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon RDS We needed to use PostgreSQL due to it being the database engine that our application vendor uses. Once we were constrained on the database engine choice then Microsoft products (eg. SQL Server), whether on premise or in the cloud, were not appropriate. Therefore the only … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon RDS Even though Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is costlier than postgre SQL, We prefer Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) just because of high performance and security features Incentivized Helpful? Anthony Aziz Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Full Circle TMS (Computer Software, 1-10 employees) Chose Amazon RDS We prefer RDS to spin up our own MySQL instances via traditional servers, EC2 instances, or containers, and RDS provides all of our DB needs compared to other database products AWS offers. As mentioned, the manageable, operational, security, and reliability features of RDS that … Incentivized Helpful? Erlon Sousa Pinheiro Senior Devops Engineer in Information Technology at SOTI (Computer & Network Security, 1001-5000 employees) Chose Amazon RDS Actually you can have most of these tools through AWS Relational Database Service as they are basically those technologies provided as a service. It is way better to have those products provided as a service through a huge and reliable infrastructure like AWS. Incentivized Helpful? Bob Smith Tech Co-Founder in Corporate at Infofree.com (Computer Software, 1-10 employees) Chose Amazon RDS It's hard to identify how Amazon RDS stacks up against the databases they support, because to install and use a relational database in a production environment you need a Database Administrator to help install, configure and manage. Amazon RDS keeps the details simple enough … Incentivized Helpful? Gabriel Samaroo Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Rocketrip (Computer Software, 11-50 employees) Chose Amazon RDS Amazon Relational Database Service will probably give you everything you need from a traditional manual DB setup, except everything is managed for you. The only downside is having to pay the premium for the service; however, the trade-off of not having to deal with the … Incentivized Helpful? Tim Weisbrod Co-Founder & President in Corporate at FantasyDraft (Sports, 11-50 employees) Chose Amazon RDS RDS provides all the features of databases you could host yourself, without all of the maintenance and headaches required, while providing more flexibility and lower TCO. Incentivized Helpful? Dharma raju DevOps Engineer/Linux Admin in Information Technology at Vidyayug (Education Management, 11-50 employees) Chose Amazon RDS Automated snap-shotting every 24 hours is, again something that I could just set up in minutes with a few clicks, though we also backup on cron jobs to elsewhere, and, because of our industry we have a HUGE "forensic logs" that initially live in the database but get archived … Incentivized Helpful?	Microsoft Verified User Chose Microsoft SQL Server SQL Server is way ahead of the support available and documentation available. Oracle should invest heavily in bringing good technical books on MySQL rather than putting documentation online and expect users to go through it. Easy to manage all tools without extra cost is a big … Incentivized Helpful?
	Would buy again
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Delivers good value for the price
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Happy with the feature set
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Lived up to sales and marketing promises
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Implementation went as expected
No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic

User Ratings
	Amazon RDS	Microsoft SQL Server
Likelihood to Recommend	8.8 (130 ratings)	7.9 (99 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	8.4 (5 ratings)	9.0 (6 ratings)
Usability	8.0 (7 ratings)	7.2 (13 ratings)
Availability	9.0 (1 ratings)	10.0 (1 ratings)
Performance	7.0 (1 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Support Rating	9.6 (13 ratings)	7.9 (25 ratings)
In-Person Training	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Online Training	10.0 (1 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (5 ratings)
Configurability	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (1 ratings)
Ease of integration	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Product Scalability	9.0 (1 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)