One of the key principles of cloud economics is the ability to only for active use of a service. However, many cloud services don’t actually work that way in reality – for example, Office 365 and Active Directory Premium both are priced per user and not per use. If your end users only upload one document to SharePoint in a year, you pay the same price as the end user who uses it every five minutes.
Azure SQL is priced on a constant use basis – there is no mechanism for “pausing” an Azure SQL Database. At a minimum, your Basic database will cost ~$5 US / month. If you scale up your database to S1 (for example, if you have a database larger than 2 GB) the S1 database will cost ~$15 US / month. Storage is bundled into the price at its fixed at 250 GB for Standard and 500 GB for Premium.
Azure Data Warehouse is priced differently – it is priced per hour based on how many performance units you use at $0.70 US / hr. On a monthly basis, this is about ~$521 per month. In addition, the storage price is independent and not bundled into this price. You can pause your Azure Data Warehouse and only use it for when you need it. In addition, you can scale up your warehouse to massive processing power for an hour and then scale it back down or pause the service.
Azure Data Warehouse uses RA-GRS storage which is $0.061 / GB for the first terabyte and then cheaper as your storage increases. If you have a 10 TB warehouse, the cost of storage is ~$599 US / month.
