OLTP options in Azure

OLTP systems are designed to efficiently process and store transactions, as well as query transactional data.

The following table summarizes the key differences in capabilities between OLTP options in Azure:

	Azure SQL Database	SQL Server in an Azure virtual machine	Azure Database for MySQL	Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Is Managed Service	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Runs on Platform	N/A	Windows, Linux, Docker	N/A	N/A
Programmability	T-SQL, .NET, R	T-SQL, .NET, R, Python	T-SQL, .NET, R, Python	SQL
Maximum database instance size	4 TB	256 TB	1 TB	1 TB
Supports capacity pools	Yes	Yes	No	No
Supports clusters scale out	No	Yes	No	No
Dynamic scalability (scale up)	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Temporal tables	Yes	Yes	No	No
In-memory (memory-optimized) tables	Yes	Yes	No	No
Columnstore support	Yes	Yes	No	No
Adaptive query processing	Yes	Yes	No	No
Readable secondaries	Yes	Yes	No	No
Geographic replication	Yes	Yes	No	No
Automatic failover to secondary	Yes	No	No	No
Point-in-time restore	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Row level security	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data masking	Yes	Yes	No	No
Transparent data encryption	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Restrict access to specific IP addresses	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Restrict access to allow VNET access only	Yes	Yes	No	No
Azure Active Directory authentication	Yes	Yes	No	No
Active Directory authentication	No	Yes	No	No
Multi-factor authentication	Yes	Yes	No	No
Supports Always Encrypted	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Private IP	No	Yes	Yes	No