SQL Server Reviews

My usual use cases for SQL Server include everything, as it functions as both a data warehouse and OLTP system, among many other applications. SQL Server serves both OLTP and OLAP purposes since the scope of what I do is quite broad.

The most valuable feature of SQL Server that I have found is the Ledger in the most recent releases. What I particularly appreciate about the Ledger is that it is immutable, meaning you cannot edit anything, so the end user can always trust the numbers.

I find SQL Server's ability to integrate with other Microsoft services, such as Azure, in supporting business intelligence and data analytics workflows to be excellent. It simply works seamlessly.

Having this level of integration is very important to me because it makes my life easier. I integrate SQL Server with various services including Fabric, Excel, and SharePoint. Every one of these integrations is seamless, and I have not encountered any issues with them.

SQL Server's high availability and disaster recovery features work for supporting mission-critical applications, but there is much more to wish for. These features are not quite ready yet, although they do function. However, they could be significantly better.

High availability and disaster recovery features should be improved in the next releases. I have noticed that everything could be improved or enhanced in the future, particularly temporal tables and window functions. Sometimes, I believe Microsoft releases features to stay ahead of competitors, but they do not make them feature-rich or feature-complete. They release something to be ahead of leaders and then seem to forget to maintain and upgrade them.

I want Microsoft to pay more attention and be more mindful about the things they implement. It is fine to do a first release that works, but you cannot simply abandon it in the following years without service packs and improvements. You must continue to build on features rather than forgetting about them.

I have been working with SQL Server for thirty-three years.

SQL Server is quite stable, though there are a few bugs that we are sorting out. There was an issue with memory-optimized tables, but it was resolved in 2025, allowing you to remove that file group, which was not possible before. There are still some issues with Ledger that I am discussing with Peter from Hogen.

You should actually be able to delete things from the Ledger from the beginning, not in the middle or at the end of the blockchain, but from the start of the blockchain. You should be able to delete old rows. There were critical repercussions from this issue, as the databases decreased in size immensely, filling the disk and causing everything to stop. We had to drop the Ledger table as a result.

SQL Server is quite scalable, though it needs some more work in disaster recovery and availability groups. When the needs of my customers grow and they want to expand, SQL Server usually accommodates this. Most of the time, they simply add another node in the availability group. They can offload some work, perform backups from one node, handle reporting from another node, and so on.

I am an MVP, so I am constantly in touch with the technical support of Microsoft for SQL Server. I find their expertise and professionalism to be very high, and they are very professional and courteous. Although I am largely my own support, when I need assistance, I have people on the inside. I give their technical support a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

I usually participate in the initial setup of SQL Server. The usual process for setting up SQL Server is straightforward for me, and I do not have any issues or challenges. With the deployment, I have not encountered any issues where I needed to find a workaround. Everything has only been smooth for me.

With my license plan, I have not focused on return on investment with SQL Server, as that is not my line of business. I act as an advisor for what clients need. They tell me what kind of project they want, and I advise them accordingly. For example, I tell them, "You need Standard edition because you will not be needing online operations, you will not need data encryption," and so on. With Standard edition, they have saved a ton of money and they are really happy about that.

I am aware of the pricing of SQL Server, unfortunately. I find Standard edition affordable, but for Enterprise edition with the few additions that it provides, it is not worth the money. Almost every one of my clients has reverted back to Standard edition. The extra cost is approximately ten times more for these few extra features, and they believe it is not worth it.

My customers usually deploy SQL Server on-premises. One third of them have tried to use the cloud, including both Amazon and Azure, but the price is not worth it. There are so many hidden costs that it adds up to approximately twice the price tag of having it on-premises.

I do not use SQL Server Reporting Services that much for reporting, as we create files to send to the authorities in Sweden. I have not used SQL Server Reporting Services to create detailed reports and dashboards. I have some experience with those solutions to some degree. I am working with SQL Server mostly, both on-premises and in the cloud. Consultant is the most likely role for me rather than being an end user of SQL Server. I have not tested SQL Server's in-database machine learning capabilities yet. In my experience, I have not used SQL Server Analysis Services for data mining and creating analytical models in the last twelve years.

I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

I use SQL Server for managing multiple customer databases and in-house databases, with my day-to-day activities for SQL Server including managing them from the database administrator point of view, for automation, for performance, for data security, and for compliance perspective.

SQL Server has several lovable features including a fabulous GUI through SSMS, their flawless HADR functionality Always On which I can explore anywhere, their SQL Server Agent for scheduling without depending on Windows Task Scheduler, and their DMVs, Dynamic Management Views, and Dynamic Management Functions to query anything internal and know what is happening behind the scene in SQL Server.

For automation, SQL Server has a feature of Always On, which is HADR functionality, and I have built automation around it so that it can auto heal if there is Always On latency with the combination of SQL Server and PowerShell. I check the Always On latency continually as it is a two-phase commit that can impact application performance, allowing me to convert the Always On role from sync to async to reduce pressure on the IO systems. For data security, the tightened security SQL Server provides at instance level, then at database level, and then at object level, is very useful, allowing granular access for least user privilege concept, which I use diligently.

Always On HADR functionality is one of the features that I use on a daily basis and one of my most used features, saving me lots of time, especially since previously I had to build a SQL cluster and Windows clusters that had many dependencies on shared infrastructure, but now with Always On, it is too stable with easy management and almost zero maintenance, which SQL Server handles itself.

The new features that are in the pipeline should be added to SQL Server as soon as possible. One long-pending request from Microsoft is for two-node write capabilities, as currently, I can write from one node and read from multiple nodes, unlike Oracle's RAC technology, which would be a game changer if implemented, especially with costly cloud infrastructures where secondary nodes could be better utilized.

I have been using SQL Server continuously for the last 19 years.

SQL Server is not a tool; it is behind the technology to handle your data, depending on the application, but all applications supporting SQL Server in my experience work very well across various industries including telecom, finance, banking, ad, entertainment, and workforce management.

SQL Server's scalability is very easy. I can scale both horizontally and vertically without challenges, easily shutting down the machine for vertical scaling or adding multiple nodes for horizontal scaling.

I chose 9 out of 10 due to their tech support. There was a time when Microsoft support provided very crisp answers, but over time, they have diluted their support to third parties, leading to a drop in support quality, which restricts me from giving a perfect 10, as post-sales service is crucial.

Customer support is very active, but the technical aspect is tricky because Microsoft has diluted their tech support to third-party vendors.

Positive

When comparing with other peer products, the cost of SQL Server is pretty good, and it is very easy to set up.

I have not switched. I have been using SQL Server from version 6.5 through to 2025, continuously for the last 19 years.

When it comes to cost, in the market, we have three major players of RDBMS: Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, where Oracle is the most costly database system, and SQL Server, with its enterprise features, offers low cost in comparison to Oracle, while PostgreSQL, though a merging technology, is not an enterprise-level solution and has flaws, making SQL Server the most cost-effective with good human resource availability to manage it.

When comparing SQL Server with other RDBMS products, I need fewer human resources due to its great GUI and ready-to-go features, along with cost savings on human resources for Windows plus SQL Server versus other solutions.

If someone is looking for a perfect bundle of RDBMS with enterprise solutions at low cost compared to other products and easy support and handling, they must go with SQL Server.

All of the valuable features and benefits I have outlined demonstrate why SQL Server is an excellent choice for enterprise database management. I would rate this product 9 out of 10.

For SQL Server, we use applications for transactional operations, reports, and financial applications.

Financial applications are a primary use case.

Reporting Services is the best use we have with SQL Server, particularly for processing and generating financial reports.

We only use it for reports, while we utilize another tool for dashboards.

The best features of SQL Server are availability and stability. We never have concerns about the database.

The ability of SQL Server to integrate with other Microsoft services, such as Azure for supporting business intelligence or data analytics, is primarily through Power BI for analytics tools. We use Power BI, but not in the cloud.

We have interfaces with other databases. We extensively use the ETL tools of SQL Server for integrating with other databases or text files. The ETL tools are excellent for making jobs that run daily or hourly.

For disaster recovery features supporting mission-critical applications in our organization, we have implemented the high availability feature of SQL Server. The always-on feature provides high availability in SQL Server. We use this tool daily for our risk management application.

The main area of SQL Server that can be improved is the price. The cost is substantial for using the tool. Currently, we need to implement high availability for some applications. When we consider the price for replication in another site, the pricing becomes prohibitive. Due to the pricing, we are studying and considering alternative databases such as Postgres or MySQL.

I have worked with SQL Server since 2010. The setup process, while involving many steps, is straightforward and easy to implement.

The scalability in SQL Server is noticeable in applications where we have the high availability feature. This tool has required scalability for processors or memory several times, and it was straightforward to implement. The server where we installed it has grown from 64 gigabytes in RAM to 256 gigabytes, demonstrating significant scalability capabilities. SQL Server performs exceptionally in this aspect.

I would rate Microsoft support for SQL Server a 5 out of 10. We have only needed support a couple of times in the last three years. When we created support tickets, the experience was very positive.

Positive

I have not used any machine learning capabilities with SQL Server.

I have not utilized data mining or created analytical models as we use another tool for those applications.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate SQL Server a 10.

Currently, I am only performing manual querying to validate the data.

My main use case with SQL Server includes assigning roles to new joinings. If there is any new joining in our project, I have access to assign roles to them, such as only read access or write access, so that the security of the database is protected.

SQL Server has made a positive impact in our organization. SQL Server is the source, and there is an Aloha team which is loading the data into SQL Server from the business, and we are using that data. The backup and recovery allow us to easily access previous 10 to 15 years of data, which is only possible using SQL Server due to its uniqueness in handling large data sets. Another thing is faster query performance; using SQL Server, we can query multiple tables at a time by connecting to different servers at once. Compared to other SQL querying tools, it provides output in lesser time while also allowing for parallel processing. These features have saved us a lot of time.

Regarding needed improvements, I find the interface of SQL Server to be fine; anyone with previous knowledge in SQL querying can easily use SQL Server. The technical support from Microsoft is good and they have a large online community, which is beneficial. The documentation is also good, allowing a person who is new to SQL Server to easily find the tool accessible to them. Therefore, aside from the two issues I mentioned, everything else looks good from my perspective.

My experience with Microsoft products is very good. In my job, we are working with reporting services.

We have emulated SSRS server from on-premises server to the cloud, and now the server is running on the cloud. The first one is very good, and all the products that we have running are okay for us. Another product from Microsoft that we are working with is Visual Studio 2022, and we also have projects with Visual Studio 2017. Additionally, we are working with business intelligence products projects; we have development projects to extract information from our databases and then produce new reports or new information using DTS or ETL projects with the integration services project.

We are using SQL Server as the database for all the applications that we have.

SQL Server is a good solution for me. It's easy to use, and I appreciate SQL Server Management Studio because it is user-friendly and has good performance. The services and patches are very easy to install, and I don't have any problem with the SQL Server database.

The most valuable aspect of SQL Server is very good. I have been working with SQL Server for a long time, and it works well for me as I am using it in different applications, such as web applications, Windows applications, or the data warehouse reporting. This is a large user base that we have accomplished with SQL Server.

Microsoft could improve SQL Server by integrating the tools better. I would appreciate using Microsoft Pro as it can integrate with Excel or, with a simple query, consume information from the database using Microsoft Excel. With new products such as Power BI, we can create new business intelligence reports, which is very good for me.

In my experience, I have been working with Microsoft products for about twenty years approximately.

Regarding support from Microsoft, I wouldn't rate it a ten because I don't have any issues with Microsoft Pro customer service. Until now, we have not had to use the customer service because all the products are managed by the corporation I work for, and the licenses are managed by my corporation.

Positive

The initial setup of SQL Server is easy. I have worked with Oracle too, which is more challenging to administer. The difference with SQL Server installation is that it is very easy and not complicated. There are some specifications we need to follow, such as configuring the memory, partitioning the disk, and saving data files and log files on different drives to improve performance. These are the tasks we need to follow to enhance the platform and ensure the server works better.

I don't have a specific amount or percentage for the return on investment with SQL Server, but I think the return is very good. All applications need our repository to provide services for our online business or our customers, so the return is good.

Approximately ten users are currently working with SQL Server in our company. We have ten users using a web application and data application with SQL Server as the database repository. I am also a database administrator and involved in development too. My roles include infrastructure tools, database server administrators, and web administrators.

Our version is Visual Studio Professional. Until now, we are not using the test project.

I'm not sure about the licensing pricing. When I consider moving to the cloud, if the price is different compared to my SQL, that is the only difference I can note between the two.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this solution as eight.

My main use case for SQL Server is during my internship, where we are storing the database while developing in .NET language and using MS SQL language in SQL Server. We use SSMS provided by Microsoft every day to store the database, create tables, create the database, and handle all tasks like inserting and updating. SQL Server provides proper queries, and if we encounter any syntax error or related issue, it gives us detailed error messages indicating what the error is, why it occurred, and how to resolve it. Additionally, we utilize triggers, troubleshoot issues, and back up and restore the database with SSMS. My company's whole database is stored in SSMS.

Since I have been working for the last four months, I lacked initial knowledge about workflow because when I joined, the products were already created. My current task includes adding AI features, and I need to create stored procedures for these updates or insertions into the existing workflows, requiring alterations or modifications.

Before using SQL Server, I used MySQL and PostgreSQL. Upon starting my internship, I had to transition to MS SQL and am currently working with it.

The tools I find most useful include Microsoft SQL Server and its official extensions like Redgate, which provides a pro version. We can click on SP and open that procedure, with features like formatting assistance. For example, when we type SSF, it helps auto-complete with 'select star from table name,' making the process easier. When creating a procedure, it gives the complete procedure code with a basic syntax. In my company, we use Redgate, and it helps us identify errors quickly, which is crucial for us due to the significance of error handling.

This has greatly assisted my team by simplifying troubleshooting.

SQL Server could be improved by providing some extensions in SSMS like those in VS Code, specifically features that allow users to type SSF and generate 'select star from' automatically.

I have been using SQL Server for the last five to six months.

SQL Server is completely stable and reliable in my experience.

SQL Server's scalability allows it to handle growth and increased workloads effectively, though it sometimes takes longer to load data when starting or can get stuck when multiple tabs are opened.

I have not needed to contact customer support because any errors are resolved by the IT department in my company.

Before using SQL Server, I used MySQL and PostgreSQL.

I do not handle pricing and setup costs as these are managed by the IT department, where a ticket needs to be raised for SSMS installation along with Redgate expansions. Therefore, I am not informed about those aspects.

I have seen a return on investment with SQL Server as it has saved our team a lot of time. For instance, if debugging errors are not provided, we might have to comb through a 3,000-line stored procedure, but SQL Server highlights the error lines, allowing us to focus on finding issues more efficiently.

I do not handle pricing and setup costs as these are managed by the IT department, where a ticket needs to be raised for SSMS installation along with Redgate expansions. Therefore, I am not informed about those aspects.

My organization may have evaluated other options, but since joining, we have exclusively used SQL Server. The company has operated this way for about ten to eleven years, so I am not aware of other evaluations.

I rate SQL Server nine out of ten.

I rate it nine out of ten because during my fifth or sixth month, I did not have a comprehensive understanding of MS SQL, including database creation and management sequences. I view SQL Server as a mentor and motivator in my career journey and see it as an essential tool for my earning potential.

SQL Server is deployed in our organization in a hybrid setup.

We use Microsoft Azure as part of our hybrid setup.

Everything SQL Server offers is the best because it provides various backup tools.

SQL Server positively impacts our organization by aiding in data management. It is fully manageable since we are using MS SQL for our whole database, creating a master workspace and additional workspaces, all stored in MS SQL within SSMS.

My advice for others considering SQL Server is if you are a .NET developer needing to work with an MS SQL database, use SSMS SQL Server provided by Microsoft; it is the best tool you will ever use.

As for a business relationship, we are customers.

I use SQL Server for its user-friendly interface and cost-effectiveness compared to other databases like Oracle.

SQL Server is very simple due to its GUI, which is available for users. It allows for modifications and has execution plans available, along with options such as activity monitoring. This helps monitor queries and identify which indexes need to be created in the databases, tables, or columns to improve performance.

SQL Server's most valuable features are its user-friendly nature and cost-effectiveness. It is also simple to use, making it feasible for users.

Currently, I do not face any difficulties with SQL Server as all options and documentations are available. Labs are also available for training, especially as SQL moves to the cloud.

I have around four years of experience with SQL Server.

SQL Server is very stable. It is around eight or nine on a scale of one to ten in terms of stability.

The support from Microsoft for SQL Server is excellent. They are punctual and aim to resolve issues quickly based on the severity of the case.

Positive

This is my first experience with SQL Server. I have not used Oracle or any other database solutions.

Companies often prefer SQL Server for small applications due to its cost-effectiveness. It does not cost much compared to other solutions.

I recommend SQL Server since it is very user-friendly compared to other solutions. Even those without prior database experience can work on Azure chatbots, though they might face some difficulties initially.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for .NET programs and as a database.

The solution's most valuable part revolves around data management, which can be seen in its audit features and performance.

The tool needs to develop a better audit control mechanism.

Even if you have some technical agreement with Microsoft, the technical support of the solution won't help you. The support needs to be improved.

I have been using SQL Server for eight years. I am an end-user of the solution.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The scalability features of the product are simple for me to use.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Around five percent of the people in my company use the tool.

I rate the technical support a five to six out of ten.

Neutral

I have worked with Microsoft Entra ID Protection for ten years. I also use Microsoft Defender.

Over the other solutions of the market, I started to use SQL Server since it is available for free and is more secure, while offering good performance. SQL Server offers good performance even over Elasticsearch, or maybe the others open-source database products.

The product's initial setup phase is very easy. On a scale of one to ten, if one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the setup phase a ten.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a few hours.

My company's in-house team carried out the product's deployment process.

The tool is not something that helps with the cost saving part, but I can say that is a practical tool to use.

On a scale of one to ten, when one is cheap and ten is an expensive solution, I rate the product price as seven. The product is expensive.

The tool's integration capabilities are very good. We don't have any problems.

I don't have any idea about how the product can be used for AI-driven projects because we don't use AI.

I don't recommend the tool to others. I recommended free products because they are tools that offer high performance.

I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

There are three variations available within SQL Server, the first one being that you can migrate your SQL instances from an on-premises version to the cloud. Second, you have an option to modernize the SQL platform and move to managing instances on the cloud. Third, SQL Server has an offering called Azure SQL, where you can deploy Azure instances in a flexible manner, and it can automatically scale up or down, depending upon the requirements. There are specific features you can license, as per the CPU cores and transactions you deal with in your business. There are various models of the tool that are available.

Features like autoscaling, business continuity, and security are beneficial. The tool's compatibility with almost all of the enterprise-class applications is also beneficial for users.

The tool is secure in nature. The security portfolios are changing day by day, and new security bugs are being released. The tool responds to users' requirements to deal with bugs and security issues. I feel that the tool should offer more security features to be made available. The security packages to be followed by users should be consolidated and sent to customers every day or every week so that they can have the security features updated. If security packages are available in a consolidated manner every month, it will be beneficial. I think there are certain areas of concern regarding the backup of the product that I have heard from my company's engineers. Sometimes, the tool doesn't support all the native features, and because of this, our company has to customize it to meet our requirements, which is a challenging process for our company's engineers. The tool has to be user-friendly- in terms of supporting the backup features and adapting to various backup environments.

I have been using SQL Server for 5 years.

It is a very stable solution. Hundreds and thousands of customers have adopted SQL Server since it is a very stable solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company deals with organizations where the solution is used, with between 200 and 7,000 users.

The solution's technical support is available twenty-four hours, seven days a week, with the specific SLAs associated with the product. Apart from Microsoft, there are hundreds of solution integrators and managed service providers available worldwide who provide support for SQL servers.

The product's initial setup phase is very straightforward and nothing complex. Anybody who has a basic knowledge of SQL and Azure should be able to deploy the product.

SQL Server has a clear set of procedures to help users deploy the product. Initially, to identify your sizing or capacity requirements, after which you pick up the right setup from the cloud and then configure it with the right level of storage and the right level of CPU and memory before choosing the version of SQL you want to deploy, post which you will be ready to use the tool.

You can opt for a pay-as-you-go model, which allows you to pay as per your usage, which is a little expensive. You also have the option to purchase for a period of a year or three, which comes with discounted pricing. Depending upon your usage, you can use the pay-as-you-go model for a short period of time. For longer projects, we can opt for one-year or a three-year license.

Speaking about a project where SQL Server was essential in archiving our company's objectives, I feel that customers generally like to optimize their licenses while making sure they get the right level of operational excellence out of it. When you run the tool on an on-premises version, you are dependent upon operational resources or human resources to manage it. When the tool is in the cloud, it is managed by Azure, where you can optimize or effectively use your resources, which can provide you with cost advantage or cost optimization. As the tool is flexible in nature, you don't have to monitor it all the time for performance and capacity issues. The tool automatically scales and provides you with the required level of scalability, and it also has built-in DR and business continuity features. Even in the case of a disaster, it automatically moves to a DR location and provides you with the right level of business continuity and availability.

The product has built-in scalability features. Depending upon the number of transactions or usage, it automatically scales itself. You can also define specific parameters for how the tool needs to scale or how to respond to the requirements of the users. The tool has a good amount of scalability features.

Azure provides funding for doing a PoC, so if you are a little apprehensive about using it, then you can reach out to a local Azure partner, who will be able to help you with providing the funding from Azure. Azure's funding part is valid for a period of two to three weeks, so you can actually deploy it and play around to ensure that you are comfortable with what you are doing. Once you are satisfied with the results of the tool, you can go ahead and migrate or modernize your databases. I suggest others use the funding from Azure so that you can get a touch and feel for the product.

SQL Server comes under the category of enterprise tools. Most enterprise tools have connectivity available. If there is no connectivity available in the enterprise tools you use, you can develop APIs to integrate with other tools.

The benefits attached to the solution revolve around the fact that it offers scalability and reliability. The tool also helps with fault tolerance while offering business continuity features. The tool offers its users a fully secure environment. In banking, federal government, or insurance firms, I feel that the tool ensures that its users are fully secured, and you can apply whatever regulatory governance you want to apply to the tool.

 I rate the tool a nine 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.