[wistlo]

Database analyst for a large communication company here.

I have similar doubts about AWS for certain kinds of intensive business analysis. Not API based transactions, but back-office analysis where complex multi-join queries are run in sequence against tables with 10s of millions of records.

We do some of this with SQL servers running right on the desktop (and one still uses Excel with VLOOKUP). We have a pilot project to try these tasks in a new Azure instance. I look forward to seeing how it performs, and at what cost.

[AyyWS]

Do you have disaster recovery / high availability requirements? SQL server on a desktop has a lot of single points of failure.