---
title: Recommendations on using Azure SQL Database tiers
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

Microsoft Azure provides three service tiers for their Azure SQL Databases (Basic, Standard and Premium) according to the provided database size and responsibility. Each tier is further divided into performance levels, see [Azure SQL Database Service Tiers and Performance Levels](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn741336.aspx) for details.

The following table provides our recommendations for running Kentico databases in Azure SQL.

| Project demands                          | Azure SQL levels | Notes                                                                                                                  |
| ---------------------------------------- | ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Projects in development                  | Basic            | The Basic level is suitable only for projects that are not in production and have only very small performance demands. |
| Read-only projects in production         | S2               | Only for small Kentico projects.                                                                                       |
| Larger read/write projects in production | S3 / P1          | Large websites with lots of visitors and database requests.                                                            |

We also recommend that you perform load test when switching to new Azure SQL tier to make sure the database provides satisfactory performance. Choosing performance levels that do not cover your project demands can cause slow database response times and generally low performance.

You can switch between the **Service tiers** and **Performance levels** on the [Azure Management Portal](https://manage.windowsazure.com) **->** Select your database **-> Scale** tab.