I have to admit that I was really excited about the Stretch Database feature in SQL Server 2016. This will automatically archive older data away from your database, but let the query optimizer go get the data if needed. That's outstanding. That's the type of archive solution I've struggled to implement in the past, finding the effort complex and requiring application change or active DBA management. Often I've found that only 10-20% of the data in my database was accessed often, and the rest relatively rarely. Maybe old data was queried every day, but still somewhat rarely compared to a small percentage of the data.

Then the pricing for Stretch was released, and I think it's definitely aimed at the Enterprise. If you stretch a sales database, say a 100GB database and want to move 60GB of that data away, you're going to pay at least US$930/month for the compute at the lowest performance level. Regardless of whether anyone queries the data. If you want better performance, you can run up in roughly multiples of that amount ($1860, $2790, $3720, etc), however, that's just for compute. If you add in storage, and you must, it's a minor cost even 1TB, but still, having a $1k bill for access to archive data, especially when you might find people make the mistakes and do query cold(er) data might seem like a lot for a small or medium sized business (SMB). If you have to get better performance, you'll pay more per month.

I'm not the only one that doesn't love the pricing of stretch. It seems to me that the pricing very much favors the Microsoft share price more than the value of my own business. Perhaps this makes more sense at an enterprise level where storage costs can be high, and separating out older data could result in savings. However for smaller companies, if you're running a SQL Server, even a 1TB (or 10TB) database, is the addition of another 1TB of storage going to cost much? I'm not sure it does.

Of course, there are other factors. Less data should mean much better performance from your local system. With some tuning of the feature, I would bet that plenty of people might be able to get 90% of their queries satisfied by on premise resources, when they have a substantial amount of older data stored in Azure. That's not something I can easily do in my own archival system, or with the addition or more storage.

What I'd really like to see is a stretch to another SQL Server feature added. I'm guessing we'll see that, likely in SQL Server 20,18 as I don't think this would be hard to implement. However since this looks like a cash cow for MS, I bet when we get stretch to an on premise SQL Server, this will be an Enterprise only feature, once again, ignoring SMB needs and desires. Maybe in 2020 or 2022 we'll be able to stretch on premise at a reasonable cost.