We are pleased to announce the public preview of new performance levels and storage add-ons in Azure SQL Database. These new choices enable further price optimization opportunities for CPU intensive and storage bound workloads.
Previously, the highest performance level for a single database in the Standard tier was limited to 100 DTUs and now increases by 30x to 3000 DTUs with a range of new choices in between. This update follows a similar update which increased the database eDTU limits for Standard elastic pools. The new S4 – S12 performance levels provide price savings opportunities for CPU intensive workloads that do not demand the kind of high IO performance provided by the Premium tier. For IO intensive workloads, the Premium tier continues to provide lower latency per IO and an order of magnitude more IOPS per DTU than in the Standard tier.
Read more about it in the Azure blog.