Microsoft has recently added a new G-series of VMs built on the latest Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family with plenty (up to 6.5 TB0 of local Solid State Drive (SSD) space. Microsoft has also made available (in preview mode) the latest Azure SQL Database V12 which provides nearly complete compatibility with the Microsoft SQL 2014 Server engine and promises better performance (in the Premium level). I've decided to run my simple OLTP test against the database created: on the local instance of SQL 2014 with data and log files placed on the SATA hard drive (labelled below as DELL (HDD)) on the local instance of SQL 2014 with data and log files placed on the SSD drive (labelled below as DELL (SSD)) on the SQL 2014 installed within a G2-series VM (4 cores, 56 GB) with data and log files placed on an attached 100 GB drive (labelled below as Azure G2) on the SQL 2014 installed within a G2-series VM with data and log files placed on a virual disk created on top of the 8 x 100 G