SQL Server Reviews

We use SQL Server to host our ERP system. It serves both as the underlying database and server application software. This database solution handles all our ERP calls.

We use SQL Server to support Business Intelligence. It also connects with Power BI. We create all our views and datasets in SQL, specifically for Power BI. Previously, we used Tableau but transitioned to Power BI for all our analytics needs.

SQL Server provides access to audio information and audio tables. You can customize and create views. The ability to customize and upload these services is uncertain when migrating, but SQL in a local environment or Azure seems suitable for now. The ability to see tables, reviews, and custom script options is good.

The upgrades are unstable.

I have been using SQL Server for several years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The support is pretty good. We have never had to reach out to Microsoft for issues. It is a pretty solid application.

The initial setup is straightforward. You need to install technical agents and create databases.

We use Active Directory authentication. If you have access to the database, it's secure. Not everyone with access to the database can access it. Only our IT staff or those who require access have permission. It does offer a high level of control and security.

We have a small team. We could explore Azure Virtual Desktop or engage with local partners if we need additional technical knowledge. We employ a cloud gateway, enabling our SQL database to be somewhat cloud-based. This facilitates integration with various cloud applications, such as the Power Platform. We use Power Apps and Power Automate, allowing us to connect to our database in adaptable and scalable ways.

I recommend the solution if it meets your requirements.

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

We use the solution for data quality purposes like checking, testing, and writing its cases using data validity and quality measurements.

The valuable features are Excel integration, writing a query in SQL Server, exporting the data, and copying the data.

When transferring data from the SQL Server to Excel, the data types are not copied correctly. This issue might be associated with the formatting of the data types. Specifically, the data types for dates and timestamps have not been copied correctly.

In SQL, as with other databases, abbreviations are commonly used to simplify tasks such as writing queries or commands.

I have been using SQL Server for 3 years. We are using V18.0 of the solution.

The product is stable. The community is big.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

The data warehouse engine should be scalable.  It's not scalable. We use it every single day.

I rate the solution's scalability a three out of ten.

I have used Oracle Server.

The initial setup is straightforward. The connection to the database is not straightforward. There are many ways to connect to the database. It may be tricky to choose which way to connect.

I rate it seven or eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

The solution is good for a transaction database, but its performance is not very good. One or two persons are needed to maintain an SQL server.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use SQL Server for data warehousing or business-intelligent projects. When you leverage the solution with Azure, it's the only database you'll ever need. Oracle is overpriced, but Azure SQL and on-premise SQL are both great products.

The fact that SQL Server fully integrates within the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a plus.

The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on.

I have been using SQL Server for 25 years.

SQL Server is a stable solution.

Compared to other solutions like MongoDB and MySQL, SQL Server is a scalable solution.

The solution’s technical support is okay.

Positive

Oracle is an expensive relational database, and its configuration can be overly complicated. Oracle is less user-friendly. MySQL is not a relational database, but it's a flat-file database. MongoDB is a free tool that allows you to get what you pay for.

The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on. It could be complex, but any database platform will have some complexity.

Historically, SQL Server has been much more affordable than Oracle, which is overpriced.

SQL Server can be used for web applications and Dynamics Business Central. Any Azure app will deploy some element of SQL Server. The solution's security features meet our data protection requirements. SQL Server integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Entra, making it secure. However, since SQL Server is the most popular product, it's also the most popular platform to be hacked.

The solution's data analysis capability, performance monitoring, and error logging are all pretty good. I would recommend SQL Server to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company to take care of the database management area.

The solution should provide users with features to automate some of the daily routines for which there are different tools available. SQL Server should serve as an out-of-the-box tool for database maintenance.

Maintenance of the solution is an area of concern, and improvements can be helpful. The solution should offer an out-of-the-box tool with automatic maintenance procedures, which could make it easier for less experienced people to set up the product easily.

I have been using SQL Server for twenty five years. My company is a system integrator and a Microsoft partner.

It is an extremely stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I deal with small, medium, and large-sized customers who use the tool.

It takes a lot of time for users to reach out to the right technical experts who can resolve their issues. Users are redirected to go through the medium-level support, who fail to resolve their issues. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have limited experience with MySQL. I like SQL Server more than MySQL. Compared to SQL Server, MySQL requires more technical expertise in order to deal with some easy tasks.

The product's initial setup phase is easy.

The solution can be deployed in ten to fifteen minutes.

The product is offered at a very high price, specifically for the enterprise segment, making it very difficult for our company to sell the product to our customers. In the enterprise segment, the tool has quite a bit of experience. For normal cases, the prices are okay.

For development purposes, the tool is free. For medium-sized customers who don't need some enterprise features, the tool would be available for 200 USD per month. For the enterprise segment, the tool's cost can go up to 6,000 USD.

I have limited experience with scaling SQL Server for large datasets.

Speaking about the most beneficial for our company's data analysis needs, I don't know the huge range of services offered by Microsoft, like reporting or integration services, which make it easy for the users to deal with database manipulation, integrations, and reporting. The aforementioned services offered by Microsoft are quite user-friendly.

The tool covers almost all of the security features for data protection with a variety of access protocols, and the database encryption part covers all the cases in my company.

The solution is easy to maintain if you know what exactly you need to do.

The people required for maintenance depend on the scale at which the product is used in an environment, but under normal circumstances, one person is required to take care of the maintenance process.

My company uses the tool for a variety of integrations, especially with the old legacy systems, which can easily be adapted to SQL Server. With modern architectures and web services, it is also possible to integrate SQL Server with any product in the market currently.

Before buying the product, users should check and remember all the licensing parts of the tool since it can be very complex. Users should check very thoroughly for the use case and exactly what prices they need to pay to use it.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

SQL Server, a widely adopted database management system, is utilized across numerous sectors. Initially competing with Oracle and Db2, SQL Server has gained popularity. It serves as the backend database for a variety of applications. 

The tool's support needs to be improved. 

I have been using the product for 25 years. 

Performance issues are a common concern when using SQL Server. However, it's important to recognize that the problem may not solely lie with SQL Server. It is stable. My team has four members using it. 

I find that using SQL Server is more cost-effective than Oracle. Although Oracle remains the top choice regarding power and stability, SQL Server is steadily catching up. We still have dedicated administrators for Oracle maintenance, whereas SQL Server requires less maintenance. While I'm not entirely clear on all the technical features and comparisons, Oracle generally offers more advanced features, such as table-locking options.

The tool's deployment is easy. 

We also have a data warehouse. This warehouse feeds into Power BI for data presentation. Currently, we're in the process of transitioning because we have various teams and solutions in place.

The tool serves the purpose of managing all the data within a system. It is utilized extensively for storing, processing transactions, and conducting analysis.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. Its ability to integrate with other products is good. The tool is popular and easy to manage. You can find resources easily to manage it. 

In my data warehousing project, I use SQL Server alongside Power BI. SQL Server serves as the data storage solution, while Power BI is used for data visualization.

The most valuable features for database management in SQL Server are SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio Code with its administration capabilities.

Improvement in SQL Server should focus on lowering the high cost, especially for environments requiring extensive CPU and memory usage like data warehousing. While existing features are great, affordability is a significant concern, particularly for enterprise licenses. Additionally, enhancements in managing availability groups and clustering could be beneficial.

I have been working with SQL Server for 20 years.

I would rate the stability of the solution as a nine out of ten.

SQL Server is highly scalable, but the scalability comes with a price tag. Additionally, for on-premise deployments, hardware purchase is necessary, which can be a limiting factor. I would rate the scalability of the solution as an eight out of ten. We have approximately 500 users at our company.

My experience with SQL Server's customer support has been positive in the past, but recently, I have noticed a decline in responsiveness, and now I would rate them as an eight out of ten instead of a perfect ten. While I used to receive prompt answers to my inquiries, I have had a question pending for several weeks now without a resolution. It seems that Microsoft's focus on Azure may be impacting their support for on-premise solutions like SQL Server.

Positive

The initial setup of SQL Server is straightforward and user-friendly and I would rate it at around an eight out of ten for ease of use. While the basic setup is simple, additional considerations for security may require some tweaking. 

Deploying a SQL Server for testing purposes typically takes around ten minutes, while for production, it can take an entire day due to the additional tweaking required for optimal performance and security.

SQL Server is generally more expensive than other solutions. I would rate the price of the enterprise version of SQL Server as a ten out of ten for being very expensive compared to the standard version. The enterprise version costs approximately 20 times more than the standard version.

We use SQL Server Availability Groups for high availability. It supports our requirements well and is preferred over cluster solutions for its effectiveness.

SQL Server offers advanced security features like data masking, which allows users to restrict access to specific columns, enhancing data privacy and control. This capability is particularly useful for protecting sensitive information from even database administrators.

SQL Server is the primary technology we use, tightly integrated with our existing IT infrastructure and applications. We rely on Microsoft products for seamless compatibility and avoid unnecessary complexity by sticking to a single vendor ecosystem.

My recommendation for using SQL Server is that it is a stable and versatile option with a lot of capabilities. However, there are cheaper alternatives available on the internet that offer similar performance. It is essential to consider whether the cost difference justifies the added performance of SQL Server, especially when cheaper options can achieve comparable results with slightly slower hardware.

Overall, I would rate SQL Server as an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for continuous integration, including CI/CD integration.

Support could be improved.

I have been using SQL Server since 1992. I’ve used AWS and Azure for two and three years, respectively.

The stability is fine, especially if you're hosting it on AWS or Azure. You can get up to 99.99% stability on AWS.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

You can scale to any extent. You need to increase your EC2 or your app server.

Six team sites with 50 users each are using this solution.

Sometimes the response time was high.

The initial setup is straightforward. Depending on the complexity, setting up the infrastructure can take a while. You can work on MVP. To deploy on AWS, select SQL Server along with several calls and CPU.

The solution was deployed in-house.

You receive other products, like free usage, depending on the number of product shares.

You can use a Cloudflare or web application layer that controls security. Furthermore, you can implement SQL reverse proxy practices for in-house environments and beyond.

To ensure the security of my SQL server, we typically set up a configuration where an API communicates with the SQL Server, and there's a front-end interface. This setup prevents direct access to the database.

Four people are required for the solution’s maintenance, but it depends on the complexity of the solution. You can put one senior and three trainees.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and SQL Server is one of the products that we implement for our clients. People use SQL Server primarily for business intelligence.

If you have Navision or Dynamics AX, and you need a data warehouse to be able to improve the performance of your business, then that is what our company does.

For this review I will describe one of our clients. They are a large company that owns convenience stores, and they do several billion euros a year in business world wide. The convenience stores are located in large travel hubs like airports, train stations, office buildings, and large supermarkets. Everyone who flies/travels a lot has shopped in their stores. In Romania, they have 300 stores and sell between 300,000 and 500,000 items a day across the network.

This customer is very mature and we have provided a lot of features. The most important is forecasting. When the store manager comes to the store in the morning they receive an order proposal dashboard from us. We will have taken the data from the close of business the night before, then built a forecast for the manager to help decide what to order the next day. This a very important application. We are able to calculate the orders across the network better than the ERP can.

Another use case has to do with the actual items in convenience stores. They sell products such as cigarettes, drinks, sandwiches, magazines, and more. In Eastern Europe, there's still a high percentage of people that smoke cigarettes, and what you want to do, as a retailer, is negotiate your contracts with the large vendors.

There are people called buyers, and they sign contracts with the major suppliers. Our use case provides a tablet with a very rich dashboard to show everything that is going on between the buyer and the vendors that they buy from. In those negotiations, especially when dealing with very larger vendors, you sell millions of euros of goods, such as cigarettes, each year. The goal is that you are trying to get the vendor to give you a lower price. At the same time, the vendor is trying to get you to pay a higher price. That's business.

In that discussion, the person with the best data gets the best price. Naturally, it's a high-conflict discussion and you have to have a way of taking out the conflict and replacing it with a more logical, rational argument. The person with the best data wins the argument and gets the best price. That capability is worth a lot of money. Although only a dozen people use it, it's one of the top applications used by that customer.

One of the most valuable features is partitioning because it helps to distribute the workload. Consider that you sell 400,000 or 500,000 items each day, and there are 10 years worth of history stored in the data warehouse. That is a lot of transactions. Partitioning allows you to split it up into smaller pieces so that the machine can be easily deal with it.

By default, SQL Server has relatively poor partitioning, and it only works properly if you buy the Enterprise Edition, which costs about $14,000 USD per core. Partitioning was only introduced in 2005 and because we were working with it from before that time, we had to do partitioning manually. With Standard Edition, the list price is $3,700 per core. So we still do partitioning manually.

With SQL Server SE, for a $50,000 USD or so license, we can get a 16 core server and manage data warehouses in the 15-20TB range. It runs really well.

By comparison, we had a large telecom client in 2004. We used an 18CPU Sun Server running Oracle and 15TB of EMC disk. That cost us nearly $2.5 million USD. Nowadays, we can do a great deal of what we did back then with $100,000 USD. This is amazing because in places like Eastern Europe where you have constrained budgets SE is a really good option. It's actually cheaper than running MySQL.

SQL Server is very popular in this region because of the price.

From version 2014 to version 2016, the performance really improved. We also moved to new hardware, resulting in a four-times speed-up of the processing. Now we can supply a 16-core, 15TB, data warehouse loading hundreds of thousands of transactions per day for $100,000 purchase or cheaper via hosting partners. The price of SE for the features it provides is why we use it so often.

There are a lot of things that it doesn't do in terms of business intelligence. However, you can live without a lot of them.

A lot of people want AI/ML features, but SQL Server does not really support that space. R is included but it's kind of clunky. That said, you're not going to do AI/ML with SQL Server because you're going to use Synapse, Databricks, or another similar tools.

SQL Server doesn't have proper bitmap indexing, a proper columnar database version, or proper implementation of materialized views. For example, if you want to do a materialized view, you can only do one on the base tables. You can't do a materialized view on top of another view. For us that makes materialized views useless.

I have been working with SQL Server for approximately 25 years. We began working with SQL Server version 6.

SQL Server is solid as a rock now. It never used to be. It was quite flakey in the past.

In fact, databases as a whole have matured very well. I used to work for IBM in the 1990s and I sold DB2. We had our share of problems, that's for sure.

Many of my customers are using SQL Server 2019.

Today, a 15TB data warehouse is not very big. However, if you consider this customer has 300 stores nationally, selling up to half a million items per day, then that's a fairly substantial customer.

There are bigger customers that you need to worry about. They want more products and more speed, but they have more money. 

The bottom line is that SQL Server is still an SMP database. Because we're only talking about data warehousing, there are some fairly simple rules to apply to get it to scale up quite well.

You can put two billion rows in a partitioned table. This customers largest partitioned table is more than three billion rows. That is 10 years of stock history. We use that for forecasting. That's quite a lot when you're only paying $50,000 for the database license. A similar machine, 15 years ago, would cost approximately $2 million.

Clearly, you can't compare how well a $100,000 SQL Server running on Windows compares with a shiny new million-dollar Yellowbrick server. They are completely different classes.

Ultimately SQL Server SE is most suitable for a small to medium-sized business. In a data warehousing scenario, you can do a very passable job with SQL Server SE for enterprises up to half a million transactions per day.

The technical support that Microsoft provides is great. They have forums and things like that, and you can talk directly to a Microsoft SQL Server engineer on their forums if you have a problem. But we very rarely have serious problems. I have only spoken with a Microsoft engineer with a serious problem once in the last 17 years. That is amazing really. On one project I did in 2000 we actually had a paid microsoft engineer on site we had so many problems! 

Positive

I have been working in IT for 40 years and I've worked with all of the major databases for BI. These include Oracle, IBM Db2, Netezza, Sybase IQ, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

PostgreSQL and MySQL are available to use free of charge. However, there is more to do in order to get things to work on those databases. This extra work costs money. Over a five-year period, SQL Server SE is cheaper.

I used to sell a lot of Sybase IQ to telecoms. The only choices were Oracle, Teradata and Sybase IQ at the high end. Oracle and Teradata were very  expensive. Sybase IQ would run on a bunch of different platforms and we were charging $50,000 USD per core. We sold a lot of IQ.

Nowadays, we can do a lot of what we used to do on Sybase IQ on SQL Server SE for $3,700 per core. It's a big difference.

When you're living in Eastern Europe you can see that other databases have some better features, but you've still got to talk to the chief financial officer and ask for the money.

Today, we're working mostly with SQL Server SE because, in Romania, SQL Server is very popular because it is cheaper than the other solutions.

If you know what you're doing then setting up SQL Server as a data warehouse is trivial. If you're setting it up properly, and know how to do so, it takes about a week to complete the deployment. The bit that takes the time is the creation of the partitions.

We implement this solution for our customers, although we do not support the hardware. The hosting companies are available for that. When we move to cloud-based deployment, that will be handled by companies like Microsoft with Azure.

Our customers will also have the choice of a local hosting company that is cheaper than Azure. Most of our clients host their cloud-based solutions there because it's cheaper. They also look after the hardware, operating systems, and other such things. What we see is a remote desktop sitting on top of a server, and that is the starting point for us to deploy. If we want more memory or more CPU cores then we talk to the hosting company.

Pretty much all of our deployments run on VMs.

In terms of maintenance, it's normal. SQL Server has patches and updates. The hosting company is responsible for applying those. Then, you have new releases.

When there is a new release, we have to sit down and plan for those because they need to be properly tested. Occasionally, new releases cause problems and don't work.

When automatic updates happen, we don't let the system just update itself. We have particular times where we maintain things. We have to pick a slot where we cannot have people using it, which is usually on a Sunday or something else like that. Then, we'll apply the updates.

There are many areas we get very good ROI for BI projects.  There are things that SQL Server SE is not going to do. If you want those things then you'll have to pay more money. But for up to 500,000 business transactions going in to the data warehouse per day? There is really nothing that some performance tuning will not get around.

SQL Server SE is popular in Romania because of the price.

It doesn't do everything but for the price, it's fine.

The price for the Standard Edition is approximately $3,700 USD per core. Once you include technical support, SQL Server is cheaper than PostgreSQL and MySQL.

It is relevant to consider that the query optimizer works differently between the Standard Edition and the Enterprise Edition. The Standard Edition is cheaper but the Enterprise Edition has better performance. This is something that Microsoft had confirmed when we switched from 2008EE to 2014SE.

Another thing to consider is that some applications require a certain edition of the solution. Power BI Mobile, for example, will only run with the Enterprise Edition.

Compared to other databases, SQL Server SE rates ten out of ten in price to performance and features. If you wanted to compare SQL Server SE to YellowBrick for features SE is 5 or 6 and YellowBrick is a 10. 

That said, Yellowbrick will cost a million dollars compared to $50,000 for SQL Server. It's not a fair comparison.

So nowadays we don't spend much time looking at other databases. If a customer wants PostgreSQL we will do that. If they want Oracle we will do that. But we prefer to work on SQL Server. It's also actually easier to work on.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is specific to data warehousing. I would recommend implementing manual partitioning. You'll be able to use the Standard Edition and you'll save money. If you've got plenty of money, implement the database partitioning and pay the extra $10,000 USD per core. With manual partitioning, you'll get 90% of the EE performance for $10,000 less per core. For a 16-core SQL Server, that's a savings of $160,000.

Considering SQL Server SE, and what it does for the price, I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.