I was originally planning to use Azure SQL for a client's database but Azure said that the estimated cost was going to be something around $250/month for the most basic configuration. I remember when using Azure for my own experimentation in the past, that Azure costs were higher than expected so I decided to look at GCP as an alternative.
GCP offered me a free trial credit of $300 so I accepted that by default. I created a new SQL Server instance via my GCP account, created the most basic database configuration, then connected via SSMS and created a single database table with a single Id column. That's it. Now, 2 days later with no additional usage of this database table, my GCP free trial credit has been burned down by $15. Based on this trend, a SS instance on GCP seems to cost about as much as an Azure SQL instance. Am I inferring this correctly?
Can you recommend a good quality option which provides free relational database hosting for low volume, low transaction databases? SQL Server would be great but MySQL should work too. I'm assuming that MySQL is fairly equivalent for simple databases?
I don't know about costs related to other cloud providers, but gcp's are usually really competitive on the market. With cloud SQL you pay per instance/h and you pay more/less based on different factors. Use the google cloud price calculator to have a general idea of the costs, and adjust cloud sql accordingly: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator
Additionally, here you may find all the information regarding Pricing details of Cloud SQL.
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I'm starting a project where a CloudSQL instance would be a great fit however I've noticed they are twice the price for the same specification VM on GCP.
I've been told by several devops guys I work with that they are billed by usage only. Which would be perfect for me. However on their pricing page it states "Instance pricing for MySQL is charged for every second that the instance is running".
https://cloud.google.com/sql/pricing#2nd-gen-pricing
I also see several people around the web saying they are usage only.
Cloud SQL or VM Instance to host MySQL Database
Am I interpreting Googles pricing pages incorrectly?
Am I going to be billed for the instance being on or for its usage?
Billed by usage
All depend what you mean by USAGE. When you run a Cloud SQL instance, it's like a server (compute engine). Until you stop it, you will pay for it. It's not a pay-per-request pricing, as you can have with BigQuery.
With Cloud SQL, you will also pay the storage that you use. And the storage can grow automatically according with the usage. Be careful the storage can't be reduce!! even if you delete data in database!
Price is twice a similar Compute engine
True! A compute engine standard1-n1 is about $20 per month and a same config on Cloud SQL is about $45.
BUT, what about the price of the management of your own SQL instance?
You have to update/patch the OS
You have to update/patch the DB engine (MySQL or Postgres)
You have to manage the security/network access
You have to perform snapshots, ensure that the restoration works
You have to ensure the High Availability (people on call in case of server issue)
You have to tune the Database parameters
You have to watch to your storage and to increase it in case of needs
You have to set up manually your replicas
Is it worth twice the price? For me, yes. All depends of your skills and your opinion.
There are a lot of hidden configuration options that when modified can quickly halve your costs per option.
Practically speaking, GCP's SQL product only works by running 24/7, there is no time-based 'by usage' option, short of you manually stopping and restarting the compute engine.
There are a lot of tricks you can follow to lower costs, you can read many of them here: https://medium.com/#the-bumbling-developer/can-you-use-google-cloud-platform-gcp-cheaply-and-safely-86284e04b332
I provide a solution that handles operations for brick and mortar shops. My next step is to provide analytics for my customers.
As I am in the starting phase I am hoping to find a free way to do it myself instead of using third party solutions. I am not expecting a massive scale at this point but I would like to get it done right instead of running queries off the production database.
And I am thinking for performance concerns I should run the analytics queries from separate tables in the same database. A cron job will run every night to replicate the data from the production tables to the analytics tables.
Is that the proper way to do this?
The other option I have in mind is to run the analytics from a different database (as opposed to just tables). I am using Amazon RDS with MySQL if that makes it more convenient?
It depends on how much analytics you want to provide.
I am a DWH manager and would start off with a small (free) BI (Business Intelligence) solution.
Your production DB and analytics DB should always be separate.
Take a look at Pentaho Data Integration (Community Edition) It's a free ETL tool that will help you get your data from your production to your analytics database and also can perform transformation.
check out some free reporting software like Jaspersoft to help you provide a Reporting Platform for customers (if that's what you want, otherwise just use Excel).
BI never wants to throw away data. If you think that your data in the analytics DB is gonna grow large (2TB +) don't use MySQL but rather PostgreSQL. MySQL does not handle big data well.
If you are really serious about this, read "The Datawarehouse Toolkit" by Ralph Kimball. That will set you up with some basic Data Warehouse knowledge.
Amazon RDS provides something call a Read-Replica. Which automatically performs replication and is optimised for reading.
I like this solution for its high convenience. Downside: its price-tag.
I have looked everywhere...
whats the difference between a hosted database and a cloud database they seem like the same things?
Thanks
Both "hosted database" and "cloud database" mean that the database lives on the servers of some external provider/hoster.
The hoster might even be the same in both cases.
The main difference is that the "cloud" plans are usually meant to scale more (at a higher monthly fee), so you'd use them when you expect your site to get huge soon and need to quickly adjust server capacity when needed.
On the other hand, "hosted" plans are not that expensive, but have more limitations (server speed, database size...) and are more suited for "small" websites.
Of course this isn't by any means an "official" description of the two terms, but that's the impression that I get every time I see "cloud" or "hosted" webspaces/databases/services/whatever.
It depends on the context in which they're being used, but, yes, they usually mean the same thing. When I see the term cloud database being used they are usually referencing some cloud platform like Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure instead of GoDaddy or HostGator or something. Plus, cloud is the new buzz word - I'm sure it sells better. Lol.
As Christian Specht said, the cloud servers really scale more. So why you need more scaling? and why there are many featured options in cloud database service selection?
Things are not like before. Before smartphones and earlier pc operating systems, users gets information from the server only when they log on the specific web page using their credentials. But now apps like facebook shows notifications, provide ads etc and collect/push other data in parallel while we are looking at something else irrelevant.
Hosted database are reliable to access the database when users log onto the web page. But in case of the lastest smart phone applications, it needs to access the database everytime starting from its birth (installation on the device). So for each installation, the minimum workload over the server is expected to raise up.
So more scalability is required here. More simultaneous connections, Input/Output operation requests are expected daily. So with the dedicated servers with the core purpose, and with the configurable package selection based on your expectation of user count and bandwidth usage, Cloud Service is not yet another marketing term, but is a helpful service.
I have an application which is going to be distributed to a hosting platform, most probably phpfog.
It is very similar to how WordPress.com operates, where each customer can host their own individual installation of the app on our servers. We host the 'work' files and provide the database (However, it is NOT WordPress; it's a custom app).
Each user of the application has their own separate MySQL database.
I am wondering what the most cost-effective service would be to provide this. It seems that most cloud services offer, for instance, one massive 50GB database. It is definitely conceivable that instead of an individual database, we have one huge one and prefix all the tables per user. But that seems really bloated and unwieldy. It's also not really possible without major structural changes to have one big database for everyone (And the same tables inside it for everyone) as the app is primarily designed to be standalone.
Each database really won't get that big. We are talking low GB - I'd suggest the biggest would be 5GB. However, there will be a LOT of them as obviously it's one per customer.
What would be the most cost- and performance-effective way of handling this?
Amazon RDS in fact provides a database server rather than an individual sales page; I misunderstood their offerings.
In this case, RDS is a drop-in replacement for existing MySQL databases and will work perfectly.
In a scenario with a database containing hundreds of millions of rows and reaching sizes of 500GB with maybe ~20 users. Mostly it's data storage for aggregated data to be reported on later.
Would SQL Azure be able to handle this scenario? If so, does it make sense to go that route? Compared to purchasing and housing 2+ high end servers ($15k-$20k each) in a co-location facility + all maintenance and backups.
Did you consider using the Azure Table storage? Azure Tables do not have referential integrity, but if you are simply storing many rows, is that an option for you? You could use SQL Azure for your transactional needs, and use Azure Tables for those tables that do not fit in SQL Azure. Also, Azure Tables will be cheaper.
SQL Azure databases are limited to 50Gb (at the moment)
As described in the General Guidelines and Limitations
I don't know whether SQL Azure is able to handle your scenario - 500GB seems a lot and does not figure in the pricing list (50GB max). I'm just trying to give perspective about the pricing.
Official pricing of SQL Azure is around 10$ a GB/month ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/)
Therefore, 500 GB would be around 5k $ each month roughly. 2 high-end servers (without license fees, maintenance and backups) of 20k take about 8 months to pay off.
Or, from an other point of view: Assuming you change your servers every 4 years, does the budget of 240k $ (5k $ * 48 months) cover the hardware, installation/configuration, licence fees and maintenance costs? (Not counting bandwidth and backup since you'll pay that extra too when using SQL Azure).
One option would be to use SQL Azure sharding. This is a way to spread the data over multiple SQL Azure databases and has the advantage that each database would use a different CPU & hard drive (since each db is actually stored on a different machine in the data center) which should give you really good performance. Of course, this is under the assumption that your database has the possibility of being sharded. There is some more info on this sharding here.