Short, honest write-ups of the ideas that come up in interviews and on the job. Each one teaches the concept properly, cites the Microsoft documentation, and points back to the class that drills it until it sticks.
What you can actually run on $0-5 a month: the Azure SQL free offer, Cosmos DB free tier, burstable PostgreSQL, Table Storage — what each caps, the bill-shock traps, and when a SQLite file honestly beats a cloud database.
Several managed Postgres services have genuinely free tiers good enough for a side project or MVP — Supabase, Neon, Aiven, Oracle's always-free autonomous DB, and Azure. Here's what each really gives you, whether it pauses when idle, and its honest catch.
Supabase vs Azure SQL free tier for a side project: they solve different problems. Supabase is an instant Postgres backend (DB, auth, storage, APIs); Azure SQL's free offering is a managed SQL Server database for the Microsoft stack. Here's how to pick — and what breaks when you outgrow either.
The cheapest database for a side project is almost always free. Supabase, Neon, Azure SQL free, Cloudflare D1, Turso and PlanetScale compared — storage caps, idle pauses, and the catch each 'free' tier hides.
Five practical moves for faster queries: find the slow ones, read EXPLAIN, add the right index, write sargable queries, and tune connection pooling.
The three ways to run SQL Server on Azure, and how much you trade control for how much Azure manages. When each one is the right call.
Both are fully managed, so the choice is not who patches the servers — it is the shape of your data and where in the world it needs to be. Relational depth, or global reach with a flexible schema.
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