Amazon just announced new X2iedn instance types for Amazon RDS SQL Server. They’re a sweet deal for people who want a high-performance managed database, with really fast cores and more memory per core than you can get in Azure’s managed SQL offerings.
Say your workload needs 8 CPU cores. Here’s a quick comparison between a few instance types, all priced with SQL Server Standard Edition licensing included:
So if you want >64GB RAM, but you want to stay with a low core count, you can.
However, if you want to use as much of that memory as possible, there’s going to be a price to pay. SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to around 128GB of memory for the buffer pool, although it can go over that amount for stuff – that’s beyond the scope of this blog post. If you’re looking to upgrade to Enterprise to leverage every last byte:
Or, another way to think of your 8-core options:
- 64GB: $35/GB
- 128GB: $30/GB
- 256GB: $19/GB
The more you buy, the more you save. Go figure. And of course, along those lines, you can save big on those by using Amazon’s Reserved Instances, as I discuss in my Running SQL Server in AWS & Azure class.
Does this mean Amazon RDS SQL Server is better than Azure SQL Managed Instances? Not at all: it’s just one of a bunch of attributes to consider. For example, even today, Amazon still doesn’t offer SQL Server 2022 in RDS – although I do have to point out that it’s been almost a year, and SQL Server 2022 still isn’t ready.