Azure SQL Cost Optimisation
If your Azure SQL bill keeps climbing, you're probably paying the cloud to hide a problem rather than paying someone to fix it.
The Pattern We See Everywhere
Something gets slow. Someone scales up the tier. Things improve, the invoice grows, and six months later it happens again.
On-premises, an inefficient workload wastes headroom you already paid for, so nobody notices. In Azure, the same inefficiency is metered and billed every month. Every unused index you write to, every query that reads a hundred times more data than it needs to, every report that scans instead of seeks: in the cloud, you pay for all of it, forever, on a subscription.
That changes the economics of tuning. On-premises, performance work makes users happier. In Azure, it shows up directly on the bill. A workload tuned to use half the resources is a tier or two lower, and a tier or two lower is real money every single month.
Where the Money Actually Goes
Tiers Sized for Inefficiency
The vCores or DTUs aren't covering your workload. They're covering what your workload wastes.
Queries That Read Too Much
Scans where there should be seeks, and missing indexes forcing Azure to bill you for the difference.
Indexes Nobody Uses
Every write pays for indexes that no query has touched in years. In the cloud that tax is metered.
The Wrong Service Model
Single databases that belong in an elastic pool, pools sized wrong, or workloads on tiers they don't need.
Data That Never Leaves
Years of cold history sitting in premium storage, driving size, backup, and performance costs.
Peaks That Set the Price
A tier sized for one heavy overnight job that, tuned properly, wouldn't need the headroom at all.
What Optimisation Actually Looks Like
Not a spreadsheet exercise and not a licensing trick. We make the workload cheaper to run, then size the platform for what it really needs.
First we measure what your databases actually use, not what they're provisioned for. Then we tune: the expensive queries, the index strategy, the access patterns that inflate IO. Only then do we right-size, deliberately and safely, with the evidence to show the lower tier will hold. The same approach applies whether you're on Azure SQL Database, Managed Instance, or SQL Server in a VM.
This is the same deep engine knowledge we apply to on-premises performance tuning. The cloud just makes the results visible on an invoice.
Start With a Free Look
Our free health check works on Azure SQL just as it does on-premises: a couple of hours on one database or instance, and a plain-English report on what's costing you and what fixing it is worth. If the report says your tier is right and your workload is tight, you've lost nothing. In our experience, it rarely says that.
Paying Too Much for Azure SQL?
Send us your situation and we'll tell you honestly whether there's money on the table. There usually is.
Get Your Free Health Check