SQL Server Reviews

We're using it for our on-premise servers, and we have the latest version of SQL Server.  

We use SQL Server for the database for Microsoft Navision. We also use it for the Track-It application that helps users in logging in their IT requests. We also manage all the IT inventory through Track-It. It does automatic auditing and traces online IT equipment.

We have end-computing devices with a server-client type of model. We have a server. All terminals are dumb terminals, but they get connectivity from SQL Server, and it has worked really well. We operate in difficult locations, such as Mombasa in Kenya and Mozambique in Maputo, where power is a big problem. Instead of desktop computers, we went for thin end-computing clients, and it worked really well with SQL Server.

It is a stable product, and it runs seamlessly. It is not complex.

It has been there for a long time, and they are doing whatever bug fixes they have to do. 

They have too many licensing options. They may want to simplify its licensing and bring it down to two, three, or four categories from ten to fifteen categories. Having so many different licensing options makes it difficult to decide which one to choose from. They can club things together. This is an area where they can make things easier for customers.

I have been using SQL Server for ten years.

It is a stable product.

It has pretty good scalability. In terms of usage, we have two different types of usage. For end-computing usage, we have about 600 or 700 students who use the media labs. For Microsoft Navision and Track-It, we have about 100 staff members as users. 

It is being used fairly extensively. Microsoft Navision is one of the core solutions of our business, and it is used on a daily basis. End computing is used by students. Because of the pandemic, for the last 14 months, everything is closed, and everybody is remote, so end computing has not been used, but Navision continued to be used. After the school reopens in each location, we will continue to use it even more. We definitely have plans for expansion.

Their response is fast.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. In case there is an issue, Microsoft's tech support people come online and help you.

For its deployment and maintenance, two people are required at each location. We have one database specialist and one IT service delivery engineer with networking knowledge.

It comes with the bundle package that we have. We have Microsoft Volume Licensing, so we don't have to pay for it separately. It is a part of the package.

I would definitely recommend this solution. I have nothing to complain about.

I would rate SQL Server a nine out of ten. 

SQL Server is enterprise database software. It provides the back end for any number of different applications, including web applications, and other types of internal applications, and software-based applications. It also provides a back end for enterprise backup tools. It's incredibly diverse in terms of its use case.

Scalability, cluster ability, ease of use, ease of implementation — these are all great. 

In terms of exceptionally large databases, it doesn't scale as well as Oracle. It scales excellently and it's flexible and it can provide a solution for exceptionally large databases, but it doesn't work as well as Oracle does for this particular use case. The performance starts to drag in the case of exceptionally large databases; especially where there's a lot more feature functionality. With Oracle, there's a lot more tunability.

I have been working with this product for 20 years. 

It's exceptionally stable. The ease of implementation and the ease of use can't be beaten. I think it's outstanding overall.

Scalability-wise, it's outstanding. The one limitation it has is that at the very, very high end of petabytes-sized databases, it doesn't scale as well as Oracle. Still, you're not going to run into very many exceptionally large databases. Almost 100% of the use cases for it scale very well.

Technical support is available for a separate cost. If you don't have a subscription or a support contract, then you don't get support. You'll be stuck with online forums — that's how you'll have to get answers to questions. Assuming you have a support contract with Microsoft, it's outstanding.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

This solution is available at a much lower price point than Oracle. Plus, it includes 99% of the same feature functionality. I'd say it knocks ROI out of the park.

If you're interested in using this product, make sure that you have a good understanding of best practices for database implementation. Make sure to incorporate them in your deployment right off the bat. You won't want to have to go back and have to take production databases down because you have to change the configuration, post-implementation. Make sure you get all of these things done, pre-production implementation.

They've come a long, long way in the 20 years I've been working with them. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give SQL Server a rating of nine.

We develop software for another company. We mainly develop on-premises solutions.

We use this solution with our accounting ERP software. Our product is called Orchida ERP and we have many clients in Egypt who are using this software. Its database is SQL Server.

We mainly work in ERP. 

We currently have a small project in SharePoint for Microsoft, but 80% of our work is with Orchida ERP

We have our software with SQL server for 20 years. Our software will not work without SQL Server. 

We provide consultancy in installing this solution for our clients.

It is easy to maintain, and it's easy to set up.

It is also easy to develop. Overall, it's easy.

It can work with many different sizes of data, anywhere from 10 to 50 gigs of data.

The performance of SQL Server is perfect. It does not need to be enhanced.

If you work with more than 50 gigs of data, it will run slower than Oracle.

Security is an area that can be improved. It could be more secure; more security is needed.

We have some clients who have been exposed to the SQL injection virus. 

We would like SQL to be able to manage this problem or to come up with an alerting system to alert the user that the server has been exposed. This has become more of an issue because of the Corona Virus and people are working from home.

Some have been infected by the SQL injection Virus and will lose their data.

I have been using  SQL Server for 20 years.

Most of our clients work with version 14 and version 19, which is the latest.

It's a stable solution.

SQL Server is scalable. Our clients are medium-sized companies, not large. They don't have professional IT.

We have 20 people in our organization who are using this solution, but we have many clients who are using it. We sell our consultancy service to more than 200 clients every year.

If we have any issues, we search Google and the internet to resolve them.

Our company has not used Microsoft Support. 

We have tried many versions of Oracle, including Oracle 11, Oracle 12, and the latest version, which is easy to maintain and similar to Microsoft.

Some of our clients are also using Express SQL. It is not good, but also not bad. If you have small amounts of data then it will meet the requirements.

The installation is straightforward. It is easy, you continuously click the next button until you are done.

It takes 20 to 25 minutes to install. There are no issues with the installation, it is very basic.

We did not use an integrator, we have an in-house team to install and implement this solution.

Some of our clients purchase the license and others do not; they use Express SQL Server.

One of our clients is using an SQL Server on Linux. We don't use it but it is a very interesting product. It's a good trend, the Linux environment has become a market share that is growing in Egypt.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

We can't compare this solution with other databases, as we do not have enough experience with other similar tools. 

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

There are many applications between Microsoft and SQL. Most are in the legacy direction, but some are more modern databases with those application requirements. We have used it for multi-purposes such as back-office products applications and cloud office environments.

The solution is easy to use, has rich feature sets, and is business-oriented. 

They could improve the solution by allowing more portability between on-premise and the cloud.

More improvements can be brought around hyper-threading. Like we see in work engines of hyper-threading. It is very complex in terms of the way they do it. If it was via CPU or something else, it would be much easier.

In a future release, they could improve by expanding their form base capabilities.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

I have found the solution to be very stable.

The solution is scalable.

The support is good for the solution.

We used Oracle and DB2 in the past.

Initially, the installation took a while. We have started deploying configurations that are now standardized. We have automated it, but it can still be problematic. For the most part, the installation is now quite easy. Additionally, The way they have many configurable parameters that influence performance is in a way problematic.

We did the deployment of the solution and we have a team of 15 people doing the deployment and maintenance.

The licenses are really expensive. Their licensing model should be more simplistic.

I would recommend this solution to others and we plan to keep using it in the future.

I rate SQL Server a nine out of ten.

SQL Server is used as database software. People who are using .NET and Windows-oriented tools prefer SQL Server.

It is easy to manage for the administrator. It is also easy to use for applications that are Windows-based.

It is a very stable product, and it has got backup and recovery tools.

Its security can be improved. When you look at the Windows environment, it isn't the most secure environment. It is exposed to so many attacks. They continuously need to improve the security of the platform on which it sits.

I have been using this solution for more than ten years.

It is very stable.

It is pretty scalable. You can scale your machine and nodes. Instead of using just one node or one server, you can use multiple servers and then cluster them together for failover and performance. You can also do replication across sites. Currently, we have around 50 users.

We have got support from Microsoft. They are very quick at resolving issues. They are quite good.

We were using different products. 

It is easy to install. It might take 20 or 30 minutes to install.

I installed it myself.

Its price is fine. You have to buy the license and support.

We compared it with Oracle and MySQL. We got a lot of dev inputs, and we also looked at the vendors supplying the solutions. We found SQL Server to be the best and chose it because of the vendor.

I would recommend this solution to others. We would definitely keep on using this solution.

I would rate SQL Server an eight out of ten.

It is used for the backend database for our ERP system and the document management system. We are using its latest version.

It saves time. Our data is also a lot more secure. Prior to SQL Server, things were run in a flat-file database that required a ton more maintenance to keep it running. SQL Server is pretty much bulletproof. It just runs.

The management studio is probably the thing we use the most for running quick queries and creating quick reports. Quite often, somebody comes and says, "Hey, can you find XYZ?" It is so much easier just to jump in there and run a quick query.

They can build more performance-tuning tools in it. They can also make the stuff a little more user-friendly and provide the ability to schedule jobs.

They can perhaps also streamline it a little bit so that it is not so resource-intensive, which would be helpful. SQL Server has a tendency to consume all the memory you allow it to. If you are not careful, you can basically break your server. I would like to see it having a smaller footprint in terms of system resource consumption. 

They might want to consider re-evaluating their pricing. It is expensive.

I have been using this solution for 12 years.

It is pretty much bulletproof. We never had data corruption and database failure. We've had hardware failures, but that's not the fault of the software.

It is very scalable, and you don't run into indexing issues like you would with a flat file. I don't think we've even scratched the surface in terms of its capabilities. Our databases are fairly small in comparison to others in our industry who are using the same software. 

We've got about 40 users using it, and primarily, they don't touch the database directly. They're just using it through ERP and our document management system. They are just non-IT employees. They are office users.

We're using it fairly extensively for the core of our business software, and we will likely increase the usage of it. We've got some projects in the hopper that will take advantage of SQL Server. So, we plan on increasing our usage of it.

I didn't have the need to contact Microsoft support.

We haven't used any other solution prior to SQL Server. It was just a flat-file.

It was pretty straightforward. It basically walks you through the process. It took a couple of hours.

Initially, we used a consultant to set up our ERP system, but that was 12 years ago. Since then, we've upgraded it several times, and that was done in-house. Our experience with the consultant was overall positive.

For its maintenance, we are a department of two.

We have definitely seen a return on investment when it comes to SQL Server.

It is expensive, especially when you have open-source products that are just about as functional and they're free. They might want to consider re-evaluating their pricing.

We purchased it in retail. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000. There is just the standard licensing fee. If they migrate this product the way they're trying to do everything else, eventually, it is going to be subscription-based, which is going to suck, but that's the way the industry is going, so it is what it is.

If you've never done it before, Microsoft has plenty of documentation and online guides to walk you through it. Just take your time, and follow the steps. If you can do it in a virtual environment, it is better because it is easier to start over if you mess it up, but it is fairly user-friendly. If you have questions during the setup, stop and Google it. The information is out there.

I would rate SQL Server an eight out of ten because there is always room for improvement.

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.

We use this Relational Database Management System for Line of Business systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning, Data Warehouse, Web Applications, and Business Intelligence.

Solutions are procured, built, and enhanced in the REIT industry, FMCG ERP, distribution and warehousing, manufacturing systems, knowledge workers such as workflow and portals, web applications, custom developments areas, enterprise reporting and analytics for internal reporting, and decision support systems.

Integration solutions provide robust integration to various and disparate third-party systems.

This is a simple to deploy, own, and manage RDMS.

Skills and support for this product are widely available. The security and vulnerability management are well-managed through the vendor. Lifecycles are greatly improved in recent releases, to make upgrades easier.

A license buys enterprise-grade data integration, reporting, and analytical capabilities as well.

It has broad adoption and support for integration with leading software brands such as SAP and Sage.

Data availability and security is well taken care of for the enterprise and is the backbone of first-class business continuity plans.

Support and adoption are important because skills are available to lower the total cost of ownership. 

High availability, read-only copy synchronization, and data integrity mean that it is relatively easy to ensure data security, availability, and integrity. Lower tier SKUs offer high-end features.

Data integration is available, as SSIS offers a flexible data integration platform with rich features including .NET integration for web-service integration, or bus architectures.

SSAS analytical DBs are powerful yet easy to develop and own.

SSRS offers enterprise reporting that is reasonably user-friendly.

It is easy to deploy cloud/on-premises hybrid implementations with a familiar and consistent toolset.

It is costly to implement high throughput systems, beyond millions of transactions per second. The hardware to run the systems, especially for high availability deployments is expensive, i.e. more resources to run.

Linux-based editions are not yet proven to be on par with Windows deployments.

Row-level security is obscure to implement.

Running cloud offerings are expensive; for example, the Instance as a Service offering.

Third-party tooling is required to manage code version control.

Managing BLOB data is not equally simple to implement.

The engine that implements query plans was updated in the 2012/2014 refresh that could necessitate a costly rewrite of queries.

I have been working with SQL Server for 21 years.

I have a very high opinion of the stability of the solution. It is one of the most mature products available.

Best practice setup is important to consider but when implemented correctly, it just runs.

The vendor is excellent and their relationship with Microsoft has proven invaluable. The 2008 > 2012 and 2012 > 2014 upgrades had specific issues that made them costly. Recent upgrades have been relatively painless.

We have tried using different technologies, depending on the use case. This is not the best tool for document-oriented or unstructured data.

It is relatively simple to run. We spent a good amount of time preparing the requirements for a high-availability cluster that paved the way for a reasonably straightforward implementation.

We had assistance from our vendor. We consider our vendor nimble and best in class. They contributed greatly to the stable running of the platform.

It is a positive ROI, especially in that we leverage many of the features in the offering.

With recent releases, the Standard Edition (cheaper) SKU has some of the earlier version Enterprise features. SQL Express has some limitations.

The Azure Platform as a Service option remains relatively expensive, at least in South Africa, compared to on-premises, but it is worth exploring.

Some baseline comparisons were made around 2012 to Oracle, with MS SQL Server coming out to have a lower total cost of ownership.

It is a first-class enterprise RDBMS and will continue to enjoy favourable sentiment from developers and DBAs.

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.