SQL Server Reviews

SQL Server can be useful for a lot of businesses and enterprise solutions. SQL Server is very powerful and useful when you need to store, retrieve, process, and analyze a large amount of data. In my organization, almost everyone uses SQL Server. That's about 10 people using it.

SQL Server's Management Studio is very user-friendly. I like their database and the additional features it offers. It's also easy to integrate SQL Server with things like CLR, PowerShell, and command shell

I would like to see SQL Server add the ability to write to multiple sites or support replication between multiple sites at the transaction level. If we can have data available on multiple sites as quickly as possible, that would be a great feature.

I've been using SQL Server for around 10 years. I have 30 years of experience in the IT industry. In that time, I have worked on different kinds of databases, such as Oracle. Before that, I worked on FoxPro. I have also worked with PostgreSQL.

It's absolutely scalable. 

Our clients are the end-users of the SQL Server applications, and we do all the development and maintenance for them. So anything related to support, our clients take care of it.

I work on the development and performance-tuning side, so I don't do the installation but my guess would be that it is pretty straightforward by now. 

I am not aware of the cost because our clients take care of them, but I think there are enterprise licenses. If you go for Azure Cloud databases, then you just can pay as you go.

SQL Server is my favorite database. Because I've been working on it for so many years, I like it. I have only good things to say about it. I would rate SQL Server nine out of 10.

We use the solution for nearly all of the services we provide that utilize Windows Server. We use it to provide continuous service and in respects of our mail server. 

We have found the feature that allows us to publish web applications to be valuable. 

We have 20 servers and we use disparate ones for different applications, such as Kaspersky Anti-Virus Server and Windows SharePoint in respects of the surveillance system. 

The solution should be more secure and stable and have better performance, particularly as concerns the endpoint operating systems. I would like to have a better operating system that links the CPU and the RAM efficiently.

For the majority of our servers we have not used other operating systems, although there are certain features or requirements that necessitated their use, such as Red Hat. This was rare. Mostly, we used Windows OS. 

As for the performance issue, we have recently encountered situations in which everything would fail in spite of the CPU and memory being 100 percent operable. 

We have been using SQL Server for 12 or 13 years.

As we have faced problems with the solution in both the past and present, I feel it could be more stable. 

The solution seems scalable to me. 

We have not had experience with technical support and have handled this independently whenever we encountered problems. 

When it comes to the installation of the operating system, we have found it to be easy and user-friendly. 

Our greatest praise for the solution we reserve for its ease of installation and usage. These provide definite advantages. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that we have always made use of the solution for nearly every relevant company in South Africa.

While I cannot recall exactly how long the installation lasted, I did recently install endpoint Windows 10 Operating System and this took an hour and a half. 

We were able to handle the installation on our own, as we are well versed in this process when it comes to Windows OS.

On an individual basis, we solely make use of Windows OS. There are between 300 and 400 people in our organization who do so. 

Generally speaking, we do not make use of a technical team for deployment and maintenance purposes and do so internally. There are a maximum of seven or eight people in our organization who are responsible for this. We are talking about technical people who are responsible for the direct installation and configuration of Windows OS and they do not include managers. 

I believe the licensing to be on an annual basis. In 2019 we purchased a three year license. 

We did not evaluate other other options before going with the solution. 

I rate SQL Server as a seven out of ten. 

We use SQL Server for our internal applications.

Working with SQL Server, it is quite convenient to use the SSMS tools to write a profile. I also like the profiling tools.

I like that the new version has a memory-optimized table to improve the performance.

We had some difficulty doing the performance tuning when we migrated from the 2008 version to the 2016 version. We experienced a drop in the performance. We could not understand or figure out what caused the drop in performance. We did not change any settings to cause this effect. We tried to keep the same settings.

We feel that when running the 2008 version, it was much quicker in terms of performance. 

That is an area of SQL Server that can be improved. Moving to a new version, you shouldn't have to change the configuration.

We have not been able to utilize it fully because it is not straightforward.

I would like to see the performance improved. Migrating should be easier and the scalability needs improvement.

I have been using this solution for many years. 

We are using version 2016.

It's a stable product.

In terms of scalability, it has some room for improvement.

We have 20 people in our organization who are using this solution.

We don't usually get support from Microsoft. We get it from our software vendors or we try to do it ourselves.

We are somewhat satisfied with the support that we have received from the vendor, but not fully because of the issue we faced when we moved to a newer version. But in other areas, it's okay.

We have used SQL Server from the beginning.

The initial setup was moderate. It was not easy but it was not difficult.

I would rate SQL Server a nine out of ten.

Initially as a post-transactional database, but now it's mainly a transactional database and for Analysis Services.

It's a very capable, efficient, price-performant OLAP server on which we can build our solutions.

Analysis Services, because we are an independent software vendor in the business-intelligence area.

The web interface and the command line interface could be better so we could manage and build some things around an API. If we could build our own solution, our own interface, and then manage the solution through that open API, that would be better.

With the new, big releases, there's quite a lot of work that we have to do. From 2005 to 2008, and then from 2012 to 2016. But, otherwise, it's quite stable. It's nice.

Even for us, it's quite okay. For the type of customers we have now, it's okay. But, for a big amount of data, when we are speaking about IoT Segments, and Big Data projects, there are performance issues.

If there wasn't Stack Overflow, that would be a problem. But luckily there are also other resources on the web which we can use to help ourselves. Just depending on Microsoft support it would not be so great.

We used PostgreSQL, and we also used some other OLAP servers.

It's more and more complex. The 2005 version was very nice and neat, but now it's more and more complicated.

The price has been going higher and higher. The market is quite price sensitive.

At that time there was also Sybase, Oracle, MySQL. That's at the time those databases were up.

It's good if you need OLAP services.

I give it a seven out of 10 overall, because of the things mentioned: First is that during the version upgrades, sometimes things are complicated. The second thing is the support is not so... without an open-source community it would not be so good. Third is the pricing, because it's changing, sometimes it's confusing.

It allows me to obtain access to data that I would not otherwise obtain access to from different programs. It has helped pull statistics and data, then put it into a report form to do some Power BI on it. This really helps people above me to view what we are doing, how we are doing it, and how to improve it.

Overall, it just makes your job simpler.

• Ease of installation.
• Ease of creating your databases.
• Ease of changing what your databases look like when you need to.
• Creating tables is simple.
• They have lots of different options that you can use for the fields within the tables. 

It is a simple query language. It is consistent across all versions. If you start with an older version, move to the newer version. The same code will still work.

It can go easily on a virtual machine and be accommodated by a virtual machine easily. That is a plus, as not all databases can handle that. It also will do clustering, so you can have two database servers looking at the same data simultaneously. 

You can always access the data. You could have an offsite and an onsite, and if the onsite goes down, the offsite picks it up. I like that flexibility to provide continuing operations.

Right now, the tool you use to query the system updates every month. It pesters you to update the Client every month when there is nothing new that you really need to add, but it is constantly pestering you. I do not care for it.

I have no problems with stability at all, even when they are clustered.

Scalability depends on the version. I have to know ahead of time what version I need, but that is typical of all database software. However, as long as I build it correctly, it works great.

I have not had support for the SQL Server product. 

This is Microsoft, so you just buy a ticket and they will just work with you until it is fixed. However, I have not had any issues where I needed to contact them.

We previously used MySQL, because it is a free product. It was just hard to operate, do backups, and make automated. Also, it was not scalable.

Initial setup is real simple. Just install it. Though, I recommend for new users to at least look online for training or a manual.

It has the easiest licensing.

We are a Microsoft shop, so we use Active Directory. That integrates well with this product, but we did look at Oracle. We also looked at IBM. This was the best price point for us for what we were getting.

SQL Server integration services tools

Data quality services tools

Master data services tools

SQL Server reporting services tools

Data partitioning (horizontal partitioning) tools

ColumnStore indexes

In-memory OLTP tables

We design and implement data warehouse solutions with SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition tools. This solution has:

Given us high levels of productivity

Allowed us to use an agile approach to the design and implementation of data warehouse solutions for our customers

Given us a competitive advantage in our market

We do not have much to complain about SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition in itself.

We do have some complaints regarding licensing. In an emerging market like Argentina, it is very steep for our customers to pay USD 28,000 or more on licensing for an instance of SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition. This poses a limiting factor to our growth.

We have been using SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition for a few months so far. We have been using the previous version (SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition) for more than two years.

We did not encounter any deployment issues.

We did not encounter any stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. This is the case even though the Developers Edition does not offer the same level of performance and scalability that the equivalent Enterprise Edition offers.

As usual, Microsoft offers very good customer service. The amount of resources (self-study materials, online courses, and tutorials) is huge and most of it is free. Paid customer service is also very good.

Paid technical support is very good and efficient.

I have used data warehouse tools from Microsoft since SQL Server 2000.

If you do the proper training prior to the setup, there will be no issues. However, the learning curve is wide and tall.

You could get started fast and sure if you stick to the many wizards included with the tools. However, the scope of those said wizards is limited.

We implemented with an in-house team only, with proper, prior training that was also done in-house.

Since SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition, Microsoft has been offering these tools free of charge. The ROI is mainly focused around training investment. We do the training in-house, so the ROI is around one year.

We have no issues with pricing and licensing for SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition, as it is free of charge. The thorny issue is with pricing and licensing with customers.

We do our best to design data warehouse solutions that can cover requirements from our customers within the capabilities of SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition.

The cost-benefit ratio offered by Microsoft's data warehouse solutions is, by a long shot, much more convenient for our customers, small and medium sized companies, than solutions from other vendors.

My advice is focused on companies that develop and offer data warehouse solutions for customers that use SQL Server. Consider the ROI, which is mostly training investment (for the Developer Edition). If training is not done in-house, only hire training from an official Microsoft training center in your region. Look for the best training center. Once you are done with the training, you can start taking customers for data warehouse projects.

The solution is used primarily for medium companies in vertical accounting applications. We use the solution as a good general-purpose database.

I value the ability it gives me to test on small machines and easily scale up to larger devices for live applications.

When we run into problems, it's usually during installation, and finding answers to the problem has been a nightmare because the documentation is terrible.

Likewise, I find the business reporting rather poor, and the solution doesn't work well as a data warehouse product. When I tried to use it as one, I did not find it very satisfactory.

I've used SQL Server for about 20 years, probably. I've used a number of different versions, including 2010 and 2007.

We have never had a stability problem.

We rarely have more than a few hundred users. It's more about the person using it since we don't have heavy, continuous use.

We've never had a sensible answer from technical support.

I have generally found implementing the solution easy. But when it comes to the time we took to implement the solution, the problem's always been the application and not the database. The solution is usually easy to implement because we use standard facilities. If you need something special, you run into all sorts of trouble because SQL Server gives you an awful lot of ability to change the settings.

We've used it as a development tool, and it's very cheap as a development tool. Besides, someone else has paid for it for my use, so it's a question of whether the cost suits the end user. The solution has a good midrange price for the applications in which we've used it. Oracle's pricing would raise more eyebrows, but SQL Server's pricing has proven satisfactory for our market range.

We mainly use SQL Server because it's cost-effective for our applications. We've occasionally tried other databases for various reasons. We've used the Sybase database, but the Sybase database is very close to SQL Server. We've also tried MySQL, but that was more of an exercise in porting than anything else. However, it's not a fair comparison because we had done the development on SQL Server and then used that as a porting exercise.

The solution's generally been easy to use for the general cases we've used. The solution has been satisfactory for the sort of applications we've used.

We've been very much middle of the road in using SQL Server. We don't use specialist, and we've tried to keep to standard SQL as far as possible. We don't use the clustering facilities or try to use any of the specialist facilities. We could drop it and switch to MySQL or another database if we had to. We are using SQL Server, not for the particular services it's got, but using it as a middle-range product. We're taking advantage of the fact that it runs on all sorts of platforms, and it's a good value development product that works very easily for us. We're not using it for some of the things Microsoft clients find particularly useful for. We're not high-intensity users. For people like us, it fits in very easily.

For our purposes, SQL Server is just about ideal. It's easy to use and fit. Some of the later versions, in particular, have been easy to use. We have had installation problems on some of the later versions, and the documentation is poor. I'll rate SQL Server a seven out of ten.

We use this solution to store our data and for running queries, simple select queries that enable me to create the views I need and report from those views. I'm an ESM specialist and we are customers of SQL Server. 

I like the stability of the solution, the fact that you have two, three, four nodes replicating at any given time at different locations, and they're all synchronized; if one is lost it automatically moves to another. The other advantage here is that when it comes to application maintenance, you switch onto another node while you maintain another server and there's no downtime. 

The solution could have additional security. 

The solution is easily scalable because of its flexibility.

I don't do the installation, but it appears straightforward according to those who carried out the implementation. These days deployment takes about an hour. We have 1,200 or so users. With the onboarding of more customers, we'll be increasing our use of SQL Server. For now, we have one person dealing with maintenance. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10.