SQL Server Reviews

We are using this solution as a database. The main purpose is as an SQL Server.

Our backend and core systems are using Microsoft SQL Server. We have no complaints from anyone who is using it.

We have nothing that we can compare it with.

It's much more friendly in comparison with Oracle.

We are using the standard features. I don't see any areas that can be simplified with the standard functionalities. We don't use any special extended features.

From my point of view, using SQL Server 2017 and 2019 is very good. I haven't experienced any issues or been in a situation where I was struggling with problems for which I didn't have access to proper documentation or proper functions.

I have been using SQL Server for eight years.

After eight years in our company, we have not had any issues with SQL Server from a stability point of view.

We are a small company. We don't have any issues with this and we are fully virtualized. If we need to, we can extend the amount of CPUs as we want.

Our core system is being used by 50 users, but they are not accessing the SQL Server. We have approximately 10 users in our company who are using the SQL Server.

I have never used technical support.

I am using Avamar and Data Domain. I have been using Data Domain for four or five years. It was used as the data storage for the backup solution in our sister company.

I worked with Oracle in the previous company. Microsoft SQL Server is better.

We have also used Software Center, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, and almost everything that is Microsoft-based.

It was installed by an outsourcing company. It is another sister company.

It's cheaper than Oracle.

I am fine with the pricing, but pricing is an area that can always be improved.

We are Microsoft D-level partners. Pricing is not an issue for us, because of the outreach of our mother company.

We are a Microsoft-based company.

I would rate SQL Server a seven out of ten.

We developed a product that is using five or six databases supported on SQL Server. 

It is a very user-friendly solution. It is easy to manage the databases and troubleshoot any issue. It is a perfect solution for the volume or transactions that we need to manage.

The way to make cursors and manage raw data in rows can be improved. Currently, the way to construct or build these cursors is very hard, and you can waste memory. You need a highly skilled person to make it more efficient.

It can also have support for Cubes, which is the organization of data in different dimensions by using MDX languages.

I have been using this solution for ten years.

It is very stable. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability.

It is scalable. You can get scalability by using the link servers, or you can create another instance in another server and make a link with that server. It is very quick.

We have around 50 users of this solution.

I have not interacted with them.

Its initial setup is easy. It takes a week. One of the things that you need to pay attention to is the collection.

It is a nice product. You can use it as you want. If you don't know how to use it, you will waste it. Oracle is more powerful than this, but it is great for our needs.

I would rate SQL Server an eight out of ten.

Most of the application what we use today are SQL-based applications. If you take a Microsoft ecosystem, there are many tools that connect easily with SQL - especially when it comes to reporting and analytics. Power BI is one of the good examples which can easily connect to SQL and then you can pull any report you want. SQL itself has its own tools like reporting services and transformation services. It also helps you to generate reporting and analytics and data transformation.

Overall, it helps our organization a lot. Again, it depends on what requirements and company has, and for what purpose you are using it. However, from an application relational database point of view that we are using today, it helps due to the fact that it comes with all that we need. Also, from a performance point of view, it configures well.

When you use the solution with Azure, for example, you get very good scalability. You can scale fast, whether it is horizontal or vertical.

If we use the product as a PaaS, Platform as a Service, it comes with all the security features you need - including against DDoS attacks.

The product offers good bloc storage, which you can buy at an additional cost. This allows you to have large object storage if you need it.

Over a period of time, their split engine has evolved and in the latest version, they've done a lot. Even from the management tool perspective, a lot of things have been done. A lot of functions have been added.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Technical support has been good.

The solution has the capability to scale.

The pricing isn't as high as other options.

SQL is very easy to use. That's a very good thing about it in general.

Microsoft doesn't have active-active load balancing scenarios. It's always a failover cluster. There is no active-active cluster, which other tools, other database providers like Oracle, provide. If Microsoft can consider or probably come up with an active-active cluster, then it would be good. It will be more powerful in a scenario like that.

The pricing, while not the most expensive, is still quite high.

They have something called Parallel Queries, however, I don't know how it works. I've never tested it in a horizontal way. I'd like to understand a bit more about it and be able to use it horizontally.

I'm new to my organization and have only been using the product for three or four months here, however, previously, I worked with SQL for a long time.

In terms of direct users, there are only a few. However, there are applications that are using SQL and those application's users are 100 plus, or maybe 300 to 400 plus users.

This company is in the phase of growth. If it grows as expected, then definitely the chances are high in terms of the number of users - which means we will scale up a bit.

We have direct support from Microsoft. We have Microsoft partners as well. I don't see any problem with technical support, as we ourselves are capable of troubleshooting. I'm a certified BBS developer. If there any related issues, we take care of them internally. If not, we raise a ticket from Microsoft and we get support from them. They are helpful and responsive. We are satisfied with the level of service they provide.

The solution is very straightforward. It's not too complex. A company shouldn't have an issue implementing it. Once you install everything and get it configured as per your requirements if you are an SQL professional and an administrator, it's very straightforward.

It's doesn't take too long to set up. Within a week you can get it deployed. If you do a standalone module, a week likely is not required. If it is in a cluster module, of course, within a week you can set up a cluster and then get things done.

SQL pricing is slightly high compared to where it was before. That said, compared to other products like Oracle, they are still cheap. It's not overly expensive in comparison to others.

The final price you can expect all depends on your requirements. A standard version of SQL is always cheaper than an enterprise. If you're going to go on a cluster, it's particularly expensive. However, when it comes to the value and what is provided, that is also important.

It all depends on what you need. I cannot just blindly say that it's expensive or cheap as it all depends on your requirement. Comparatively, SQL is cheaper than other products like Oracle. Oracle is really expensive compared to SQL. 

We are customers and end-users.

I'm certified in SQL. I have a pretty good understanding of the product.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Whether or not it would work well for a company all depends on what purpose it is being used for. However, SQL is simple to use and simple to configure, and very powerful in terms of relational database and the SQL language and functions it comes with. If you configure it well and then use it well, the outcome will likely be very good.

The .NET applications use SQL Servers on a very large scale. Basically, about 80% or 90% of the database platform is on SQL Server.

We are working on version 2019, but we are also now working on the cloud databases. Our goal is to stay away from versions. We are going to go version-less and move to Azure SQL or managed instance, which is version-less. This way we won't need to worry about any upgrades or any version changes because Microsoft is going to take care of these things. We will always have the latest and greatest version.

It is a pretty good solution. The on-premise version 2019 has many features, and they had introduced a really good and stable environment in version 2019. It has very good integration with big data clusters and other things. It covers pretty much everything that you can do with a SQL server. You can use any language to connect to it, which is not there in other solutions. They have also introduced Python, and it also has ArcScale.

PaaS is a modern, scalable database. You can use Power Automate and a lot of features in this. It is very easy, and you don't have to worry about versions and upgrades.

Microsoft keeps on adding new features to this solution. Microsoft is improving its connectivity on an ongoing basis. It connects well with Office 365. If you see something not working, in a couple of weeks, it is going to work because there is a team working on it. You can vote for the things that are missing, and Microsoft can work on them depending on the product that they're launching. 

There are a lot of improvements in the cloud space about which we open a case with Microsoft every now and then. These improvements are not in terms of features or functionality. They are more related to their own compatibility or connectivity on which they keep on working to improve the product.

I have been using this solution for 13 to 14 years.

In version 2019, they introduced a really good and stable environment. Bugs are there, but bug fixes are provided by Microsoft. We have premium support with Microsoft. If we find a bug, they work on it and provide a solution.

It is very scalable, but its scalability also depends on what you're using. If it is on-premise, you have to do everything on your own to scale it out. It is easy, but you have to get the infrastructure ready to scale it out. It is a manual process. If you're on a cloud, then it is pretty much easy and straightforward if your cloud has those availabilities. It also has a Hyperscale, where you can put the upper and lower limit, and it can scale up and down as per the use case and the compute that you need.

We have a lot of users. Everyone is connected to this. We have business users, technical users, application users, and integration users. We have 17,000 instances of SQL Server here with a lot of databases. 

We use Microsoft's Premium Support. They're good. I would rate them an eight out of ten. For on-premise, you design your infrastructure. When you change something or customize a few things, it is hard to get support because the issue can be from either side. When you have a critical issue, which is not straightforward, you have to go between two different vendors, and they start finger-pointing to each other. They say that the issue is not at their end, and there is nothing wrong with their configuration. The issue is because of storage or network. These are the few things for which you have to fight for support. I don't know how they will improve this. It only happens sometimes for an on-premise solution. We don't run into those issues on the cloud because it is their own setup.

A cloud solution is pretty much on their site. They are managing the infrastructure, so they have to provide the solution, and they are good at it, but when you have on-premise, you decide what storage to use. Sometimes, you ignore Microsoft's recommendation, and you don't want to use what they are suggesting. When we run into issues on the DB side or the application side, they can point out to different vendors or causes for issues. 

We also have Oracle, Db2, and MongoDB databases here. We also have some NoSQL apps, but comparatively, SQL Server has a bigger footprint, and it is better than the others. 

Other systems are more complex to configure. When you configure a cluster on the SQL itself, it is easy to configure because you've got more resources, whereas, when you have to configure Oracle or Db2, you have to have a SPEC process because they have to configure that on Red Hat Linux or Unix side. A few companies don't have special admins for Linux because the footprint is not that big. You might have two or three applications running on that system. When you run into a problem, you need to hire someone who can implement it for you, whereas most of the companies, almost 80%, are Microsoft shops. They already have the talent and resources available. You also have offline help and support. You have a lot of blogs or online help available when it comes to Microsoft, but when you go to other solutions like Oracle, sometimes it is a challenge. You really need the right person there, and not everyone will be able to do it. 

The capability of a solution also depends on your needs and configuration. If you configure things wrong, any system will fail. When I'm testing something, I always believe in the functionality because Microsoft and Oracle test their products thoroughly. I never question their functionality, but we also check it according to our plan. You have to customize things based on your needs. If you're not getting the results, you have to consult the tech support and bring them in to configure it. These are the things that you run into when you are in your own data center. If you are not getting the throughput from the storage itself, you need to get the storage admin or storage vendor in there. When you move to the cloud, everything is taken care of.

It is straightforward. There is no complexity. It is all automated, and we do un-attended install. We are not sitting and doing it. We just include it with the server build itself. When the server is built, we provide them the un-attended scripts to run, and everything is configured. They can use the media provided by Microsoft. Everything is done in one step. We just need to do auditing. We need to check at the right place, and we just keep checking it.

Cost is a major derivative for any organization. It has a reasonable cost value, and its cloud support is also better than others. Comparatively, Oracle can do the same things or is even better in certain areas, but it is expensive. The cost along with the support are the plus factors for SQL Server.

You need to know the concepts and the business logic before using this solution. It is not straightforward. You need to know what your application needs are and only then you can work on it. You also need to know about the product and how it works.

I would probably advise others to move to the cloud version, which is a modern database. If you want to use SQL Server, Azure is the best because you get the hybrid benefits. You can bring your own license, and you can save costs. You can save 55% of the cost. With AWS, you have to buy your license, which makes it expensive. If you are using SQL Server and your company is more on the Microsoft side, Azure is easier, and there is no change in it. You can also get more out of it. You don't have to put a lot of complexity in supporting or administrating it because Microsoft does that for you behind the scenes. Therefore, it is good to move to Azure SQL or to manage instances where you have more control. Both of these are PaaS solutions. There is no need to go into IES. It is better to stay on-premise than on IES because it creates more complexity. This is because you still have to build the servers, and you have to still manage them. If your application is compatible to be used with PostgreSQL or MySQL, you can also move there.

It also depends on the kind of talent you have in your company. You have to consider the talent that you have. You can choose other technologies, but you need support from your teams. If they're .NET developers and you have to build the knowledge base, it is smoother to stay with SQL Server because you have to change less on the coding side.

I would rate SQL Server a ten out of ten.

We are a company that produces stock market analytics data and we are working on creating an alerting system for our customers. We use Microsoft SQL Server in our development and I have a lot of experience with it.

In my development role, I store about two gigabytes of data every month.

One of the big advantages of this product is its performance, where it works well when the data is not complex.

If you have a lot of data and you want to perform computations on it, you will have problems and the performance will be degraded.

There are problems when you are dealing with Big Data and it doesn't scale very well. For example, in Hadoop, you can partition your data very well, but in SQL Server, you can't do that. If it could handle horizontal scaling then that would be an improvement.

We experience latency at times when there is a lot of data being processed. In Iran, there is a specific time when all of the markets are open, and a lot of people are using the data to make decisions. Performing actions at that specific time gives us a lot of problems because of limitations in SQL Server. The problem seems to be caused by writing a lot of data to the table at the same time.

Improving the intelligence for managing the SQL server would be very good.

I have been using SQL Server for the past four years, and my company has been using it for approximately seven.

I have seen that this is a very stable product.

We had trouble scaling the solution to handle larger volumes of data. We have been able to scale out by adding CPU power and RAM, but other than by increasing the physical solution, we have not been able to do it very well. For example, we have not been able to do what we have done using Hadoop.

I used Oracle in the past, approximately four years ago. That was stable, but the performance in SQL is very much better nowadays.

The initial setup is very easy.

Our in-house team deployed it by researching how to perform the setup and configuration. As a developer, I just let them know what I need from the product. For example, for my role, I have a lot of writes and I want them to optimize for that situation.

If there are some simple features that I just want to enable, then I can do that myself.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a few use cases. They range from temporary storage to long-term storage to backup systems. We're using the full versatile suite for the product currently. It's not just a stand-alone system.

I don't have access to that level of knowledge. We just basically work with it on a small scale capacity in our department. That type of information and statistics are held by our IT administrators.

The solution is very easy to use for me. SQL is the most user-friendly system for databasing aside from Postgres. 

Due to the financial costs of Postgres, the SQL system is a good alternative as the product can be utilized free of charge. 

It's a good learning environment, it's easy enough to learn and understand. Anybody that picks up the language early on will be able to develop in it.

With any development language, any programming or software language available, there's always room for improvement. 

With SQL, it requires the more advanced integrated capabilities of Postgres, however, those capabilities do really come with obvious kinds of costs. For example, if SQL were to improve its functionality to incorporate the functionality that is in Postgres. Obviously, some kind of financial licensing will need to be incorporated. It's a bit of a catch-22 with a system similar to an SQL Server. If we want to avoid costs, we have to take a step back from certain integration capabilities.

From a development perspective, the solution needs to be a lot easier to understand or it needs to be easier to implement API packages for connection pooling so we don't have connection interruptions when, let's say, a hundred people simultaneously access the network on a given system, utilizing a specific or single database. Any type of connection pool or connection integration that could increase the total number of users to access simultaneously would be beneficial. That said, I also know there are some security risks involved with that type of connection pooling. However, something from SQL-side that can increase its connection access or its connection stability for multiple user access to a single database system would be great.

I've been using the solution for the past six months or so.

The solution is extremely stable. It's got an amazing backup repository system, a fail-safe system for if any type of data should it be lost. It's got a backup system that stores everything on a day-to-day basis or an hourly basis as well. Depending on the backup and storage drive that you're using or the capacity of the server it is installed on or the local machine, you can pretty much back up any type of critical data, any recent data, or any archive-based data relatively fast. You can also pull that data again, based on the system restore and the server restore is fairly quick.

The solution is 100% scalable to any kind of circumstances you find yourself in. It's easy to use and ready for any type of environment you're working on. It's scalable to any environment as well as to any amount of data. The only limiting aspect of scalability is if you're working on a local system or working on a server-based system. The physical data storage capacity is the only hindrance to scalability. If you've got sufficient data storage, then the scalability is endless.

The only people, to my knowledge, that have any access to the SQL Servers would be the administration and the department of development. The numbers range from anything from 50 to 150 people at any given time.

I'm not sure if we have plans, as an organization, to increase usage.

Any technical support queries we relay to our IT administration team and the IT administration team handle it directly with Microsoft Support. I haven't actually dealt with them directly.

I have experience with Postgres.

The main functionality that I've encountered within the six months is that Postgres is capable to incorporate itself or integrate itself with any known choosing standard API. With the SQL Server, we've got to use connection strings or connection pooling to do this. The API function is not as robust in SQL Server as it is in Postgres as the Postgres user package is based on APIs. Packages based on other companies or software languages that have the communication protocols are already enabled. With SQL Server, you have to hard code those connection strings or connection poolings for the APIs, which makes it far more difficult to use. However, it is still capable of doing it, it is just a longer approach.

Due to the fact that Postgres is a fully integrated package installation, done from a single installer, with SQL Server you can do an advanced complex installation which requires a lot of IT administration background knowledge. Alternatively, you can do a stand-alone use case installation system, if you're just using it for a backup system. They've got a backup package that you install and that's the standard installation you use. Due to SQL's user-friendly approach, it's got a lot of pre-made installation packages that you can install based on the needs or necessities of the company.

The length of time that SQL Server standard installation takes obviously depends on network speed, and UT package downloads. It could take anywhere from five minutes to half an hour. This is all dependent on the network speed that you're running the server installation on. If you've got a fast enough network speed, it should take no longer than five minutes. With a home-based network speed, say a fiber line with 10 megs, it should take you about 15 to 30 minutes just for a standard installation.

The solution is very affordable. It can be used free of charge.

There are payment packages for SQL based on dollars for any level of additions. They offer enterprise, express, and production additions that are available as well as community additions and student additions, which are completely free.

Before anybody had even considered doing any kind of database access, they reviewed all possible capabilities, according to price, functionality, and integration requirements. Ultimately, they settled from the start on SQL Server.

As far as I remember, our administration team did review other options. I'm not familiar with the options that were available prior to this, however, as they stated to me, before SQL has been the one from the go ahead, the option that they chose and they've been running with it since then.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite happy with the solution so far.

Basically with any databasing system, SQL included, a company should be looking at the requirements for why they're looking for any type of databasing system. Is it for backups? Is it for storage? Is it for cross-communication between departments or inter-department communication? Who's going to have the access prior? If it's just going to be on a technical or development level, not a lot of people need to worry about integration requirements except the installation team. Other than that, companies should just look at the financial as well as system requirements that are basically needed for the project or for the company you're in. If a company needs a large scale solution, financially speaking, SQL would be a good solution, however, Postgres would be a far better solution due to its capabilities, integration and API access.

The primary use is to maintain my database client.

What I like best about this product is the environment.

The documentation and manuals are very good.

The pricing could be improved.

I would like to have the option to use fewer processors for certain tasks, thus reducing the licensing fee. That would be great.

I have been working with SQL Server for more than 10 years.

I use SQL Server on a daily basis.

The scalability is not very good because when you add processors to the machine, the price of the license goes up. Scaling is very expensive. We have approximately 500 people who are using it.

Technical support is very good.

We used the Oracle Database prior to SQL Server.

The initial setup is simple and the deployment took one day.

We had assistance with our deployment and the experience was very good.

This is an expensive product, especially when you need two servers, or for enterprise solutions. We pay approximately $12,000 USD per month for both the server and the license.

At this time, all of my applications are running on SQL Server. However, in the future, if the application can be migrated to Oracle or another database then I may do that because SQL Server is very expensive.

This is a good product, although my advice is that if a company can afford it then they should use Oracle instead.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

ERP Database.

Using the SQL queries, the user can quickly and efficiently retrieve a large number of records from a database. In standard SQL, it is very easy to manage the database system. It doesn't require a substantial amount of code to manage the database system. Long established are used by the SQL databases that are being used by ISO and ANSI. Using the SQL language, the users can make different views of the database structure.SQL has a difficult interface that makes few users uncomfortable while dealing with the database.

Microsoft database is very user friendly. This new version of SQL Server continues to meet these twin demands. It adds new features from the worlds of data science and NoSQL. It offers cross-platform capabilities and Docker container compatibility. But it also reinforces its investment in core database engine performance, ease of index maintenance, high availability, and data warehouse performance. That's a difficult balance and one that other database vendors don't have to meet. While this may be Microsoft's cross to bear, the company does pretty well with it, turning a formidable challenge into a positive market differentiator.

The latest version supports for big data analytics. SQL Server's vector processing-based batch execution mode is now available to the entire execution of R or Python code. Since much of the work that tends to be done in R and Python involves aggregation, batch mode - which processes rows of data several at a time, can be very helpful. Two other new batch mode features, memory grant feedback, and adaptive joins will enhance SQL Server's performance and efficiency as well. It is good to move from Microsoft to deal with big data analytics

CAL licenses should cost less. Microsoft usually prices high for client access licenses. Server plus user client access license (CAL) licensing requires a separate Server license for each server on which the software is installed, plus a user CAL for each user accessing the server. A SQL Server CAL is required for a user to access or use the services or functionality of either edition of SQL Server and frequent updates to the latest versions will lead to obsolete and discontinuing the security patches has to be improved.

Since two years

Very good stability with 250-300 users.

This product can withstand with 250-300 users.

Very good.

SQL standard 2008.

Straightforward - no complexity.

Vendor team with an in-house team.

2 years.

It is an overall very good product.