SQL Server Reviews

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.

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. 

This client, specifically, is using it for Dynamics NAV. I don't know what they're calling it today. Microsoft changes the names all the time, 365 NAV Dynamics. This is ridiculous. We're using it for that, and we have more of a niche CRM database called Tour de Force. It's owned by a company called White Cup. They own a bunch of companies, and it sits on Microsoft SQL, as well.

One of the things I most like about SQL Server is the log shipping piece.

I have another client who uses GP, and they use Power BI to take the data out of the back end. I'm doing an IT assessment there, so I'm not really involved in that specifically, other than the fact this person has too many rights.

I have an auditing background, and I spent 25 years doing IT auditing as well. I understand I'm not a programmer, but I've been involved with enough of them. The log shipping really is one of the greatest features. It is not the only database you can do it in, but that was one of the better features of it because I am a backup nut. We use Veeam Backup and Replication to a local mass storage, but then we fully replicate everything in Veeam to another site with the exact same server set up at our other location. But I wasn't satisfied with that from a disaster recovery point of view. My IT company was, but I was not. I said, "I want to do SQL log shipping. I want to do an SQL backup and SQL log shipping and move it to Azure in the cloud," which is what we do every day. We have an hour by hour backup, in addition to our multiple nightly backups and our replication to our other site, and we've had to use it and it worked. This is a great feature.

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.

I would rate MS SQL Server 4/5 for its ease of administration,rich features, Nice GUI support for all its complex features.

Valuable features include:

1.Management Studio (Nice GUI support for all its complex features.)

2.Hot add CPU

3.Configure Dynamic memory also configure MIN and MAX memory.( Very flexible)

4.Replication ( Very Simple).

5.Clustering (The best high availability feature available among all
its compitators due to its robustness and scalability).

6.SSIS ( Very rich).

7.In memory OLTP in SQL Server 2012

8.Always On (High Availability) in SQL Server 2012

9.SQL Server Profiler

10.DMVs

The MSBI features SSAS, SSIS as well as SSRS together has enabled us to build a data warehouse for our Enterprise with Business Intelligence reports around the data. We have fully exploited its all complex features like Slowly Changing Dimensions in SSIS etc.

There are many, but I would have to say the two most important for me have been SQL Server Profiler -- to run traces and the ability to kill sessions in the enterprise manager tool. This command-based functionality lets you search and sort through processes actively running on the system to find your i/o hog – that is the user that is overloading the database either through a hung query or bad SQL code.

Once the hog user is found, the terminate or “kill” command can be used to shut down the hanging transaction. Similar to how clearing a vehicle crash on the interstate frees up waiting traffic, this kill command gives other users the ability to continue work as normal once the terminated transaction has been killed. This should be used sparingly though since it can cause waiting applications to corrupt data depending on how the application was written, but it is an often used research feature when a system starts to overload or show major signs of slowing.

In an effort to forego a data warehouse purchase, one company I worked with used a second SQL Server instance loaded to separate hardware as a reporting environment avoiding the need to hire additional employees to support a data warehouse. Essentially, the production database was snapshot and copied nightly to the reporting instance where it was restored through automated processes.

All employees who wrote queries and reports against the reporting instance utilized the same knowledge, skillset and tools already used in the OLTP production environment. While it didn’t have all the abilities of a true data warehouse, it was quickly implemented and well served for the desired purpose.

We use it for the banking database. It is for banking software, accounting software, and human resource software that we develop to run our bank.

In our production environment, we are using SQL Server 2014 Enterprise, but we also have an installation of SQL Server 2019 for our development environment.

It is secure, and it is fast. For our present database size, we are using the Always-On feature on SQL Server so that our transactions are replicated among three servers. If one server goes down, we can find the data from other servers. We have benefited from this feature.

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.