There are various database management systems available to work with web based or cloud-based applications. The right cloud database system for your business application will depend on a number of factors:
- Size of database, number of GBs of data
- Type of database, relational or non-relational
- Security considerations, databases holding personal data or credit card details need a higher level of security then something just managing blog posts.
- Operating systems used by the applications, is the database connecting to a web site hosted on Linux servers, or desktop applications on hosted Windows servers?
- Scope of database, does it need to be high performance managing business critical applications, or is it simply for development purposes.
- Business budget, do you need the features and scalability of an enterprise level database management system or is a free open source database system sufficient?
What SQL Hosting options do Your Office Anywhere provide
Your Office Anywhere provides a hosted remote desktop environment where typically customers are running Windows desktop application, some of which need to connect to SQL databases.
The SQL options commonly used are Microsoft SQL Server Standard or Microsoft SQL Server Express and these are fully supported on the platform.
Does Your Office Anywhere offer MySQL hosting or Oracle database hosting?
Customers can also install other SQL database management systems such as a MySQL database, or an Oracle database, however, the technical team cannot provide technical support for these databases and will need to be either supported by the customer or a 3rd party. If the database management systems need to be installed on non-Windows operating systems, such as Linux, then these operating systems will also need to be supported by the customer or 3rd party.
Which is best for my business, Microsoft SQL Server Standard or Microsoft SQL Server Express?
SQL Server Express is a lighter weight version of SQL Server Standard but contains much of the same functionality and many of the features. It is often used as an entry level database management system for businesses with smaller databases or less access to technical resources with SQL Server skills. SQL Server Express is free to use but does have limitations in terms of the maximum database size (10GB) and the resources (memory/CPU) it can use. It is also missing a number of useful tools for managing databases. Please see this article for more detailed information about the limitations of Microsoft SQL Server Express.
What does Microsoft SQL Server Standard cost?
An outright purchase of SQL Server Standard 2019 will cost several thousand pounds. You then need SQL Server CALs for each user at over a hundred pounds per user. You can also buy “per core” licences which can be more economical if you have a lot of users, these will also be several thousand pounds for a 2 core licence and you have to licence for a minimum of 4 cores. Luckily, when hosting, there are easier, more palatable ways to pay for SQL licences
For customers hosting their applications on remote desktops with Your Office Anywhere there are a couple of other options for paying for SQL Server Standard licences. If you need a dedicated server then we can rent SQL licences under our service provider licence agreement either as user CALs or per core licences. An even cheaper option is to use a secure, dedicated instance on a shared SQL Server. In this scenario we purchase the licences and recharge customers at a fraction of the rate they would pay if renting their own. For example a 10 user system would costs just over £100 a month, less than a quarter of the cost per month of renting dedicated licences.
Please speak with our sales team who can help you decide the optimum licence method.
Is it possible to link applications to databases in Azure SQL?
Generally speaking, database applications need to be geographically close to their databases, i.e. on the same local area network. Cloud databases need to be connected to cloud applications. For applications to work with Azure SQL those applications also need to be running in Azure in the same datacentre.