---
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 responsiveness. Each tier is further divided into performance levels, see [Azure SQL Database service and performance tiers](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-service-tiers) for details.

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

| Project demands                          | Azure SQL levels | Notes                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
| ---------------------------------------- | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Projects in development                  | S0               | The lowest Standard level is suitable only for projects that are not in production and have only small performance demands.<br>Even though Kentico is able to run in the _Basic_ tier, we do not recommend using this tier as it applies strict limitations on max concurrent requests and DTUs. |
| 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://portal.azure.com/) **->** Select your database **-> Pricing tier (scale DTUs)** tab.