Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Understanding Billing for SQL Azure
SQL Azure is a pay-as-you-go model, which includes a monthly fee based on the cumulative number and
size of your databases available daily, and a usage fee based on actual bandwidth usage. However, as of
this writing, when the consuming application of a SQL Azure database is deployed as a Windows Azure
application or service, and it belongs to the same geographic region as the database, the bandwidth fee
is waived.
To view your current bandwidth consumption and the databases you've provisioned from a billing
standpoint, you can run the following commands:
SELECT * FROM sys.database_usage -- databases defined
SELECT * FROM sys.bandwidth_usage -- bandwidth
The first statement returns the number of databases available per day of a specific type: Web or
Business edition. This information is used to calculate your monthly fee. The second statement shows a
breakdown of hourly consumption per database.
Figure 1-17 shows a sample output of the statement returning bandwidth consumption. This
statement returns the following information:
time. The hour for which the bandwidth applies. In this case, you're looking at a
summary between the hours of 1 AM and 2 AM on January 22, 2010.
database_name. The database for which the summary is available.
direction. The direction of data movement. Egress shows outbound data, and
Ingress shows inbound data.
class. External if the data was transferred from an application external to Windows
Azure (from a SQL Server Management Studio application, for example). If the
data was transferred from Windows Azure, this column contains Internal.
time_period. The time window in which the data was transferred.
quantity. The amount of data transferred, in kilobytes (KB).
Visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure for up-to-date pricing information.
Figure 1-17. Hourly bandwidth consumption
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