If you’ve logged in to social media today, ordered anything online, or watched or listened to any type of content, the chances are good that you’ve interacted with an app or service that’s supported on the back end by a cloud-based MySQL database. For many businesses, the MySQL database services and instances from cloud service providers (CSPs) make it possible for them to offer responsive database-dependent products to businesses of all sizes. But cloud costs and database performance can be unpredictable. Organizations need to have confidence that they’re using a cloud-based MySQL database service that meets their needs with a strong combination of excellent performance and affordability.

We assessed the performance of four MySQL services from three cloud service providers (CSPs): Microsoft Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server, Amazon Aurora MySQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Google Cloud SQL for MySQL. In our tests, Azure Database for MySQL handled more transactions per second (TPS) with lower latency than the three competitors—up to 2.26 times the TPS and up to 55 percent lower latency. The Azure service also cost up to 54 percent less for the same performance in our scenario.

The MySQL performance advantages that we saw with Azure Database for MySQL could translate to more e-commerce sales, support for more app users, increased transactions, or better database performance when MySQL serves as the back end. Add the Azure solution’s cost advantages, Azure Database for MySQL could ultimately increase database-related performance and efficiency for a company.

For more details about our cloud-based MySQL database performance comparison tests, check out the report, infographic, and video below.