DTU Pricing Models

Database Transaction Units

The amount of resources (CPUs, I/O, and RAM) to be assigned to an Azure SQL Database in a particular service tier is calculated in Database Transaction Units (DTUs).

DTUs guarantee that an Azure SQL Database will always have a certain amount of resources and a certain level of performance (offered under a particular DTU model) at any given point of time, independent of other SQL databases on the same Azure SQL server or across Microsoft Azure.

The ratio for the aforementioned resources was calculated by Microsoft by running an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmark.

The DTU amount signifies how powerful an Azure SQL Database is. For example, if a workload of, say, 5 queries takes 80 seconds on the Basic tier with 5 DTUs, then it'll take around 4 seconds on the Standard S3 tier with 100 DTUs.

There are four pricing tiers available in the DTU-based pricing model:

Note

The DTU is the measure of Azure SQL Database performance. This is discussed...