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SQL Server pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft

4.2 out of 5

269 reviews
93% willing to recommend

2,862 followers

Pros & Cons summary

SQL Server offers high availability, robust clustering, and seamless integration with Microsoft tools and other databases, making it ideal for managing large data volumes. Renowned for ease of use and cost-effectiveness, it remains popular among businesses. However, it requires improvement in platform integration, replication capabilities, and security. Performance issues in IoT and Big Data projects, complex setup, and high licensing costs pose challenges for tech buyers.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

SQL Server greatly enhances handling capacity and processing speed, managing up to 5000 requests per second with reduced time per request.

SQL Server's reliability and stability, particularly in cluster configurations, significantly reduce downtime and improve SLAs for enterprises.

The flexibility and comprehensive feature set, including high-availability options, clustering, and ETL capabilities, make it suitable for diverse application needs.

SQL Server seamlessly integrates with Microsoft ecosystem applications, ensuring high compatibility and ease of use in enterprise environments.

The affordability of SQL Server makes it an attractive choice in comparison to other major database management systems.

CONS

SQL Server struggles with performance issues, particularly when handling large data volumes or during integration service debugging, leading to application failures and slow processing speeds.

The lack of seamless integration with other platforms is a significant drawback, affecting collaboration and data management across different systems.

High licensing costs make SQL Server expensive, impacting organizations' budgets and prompting users to consider alternative databases like Oracle or Postgres.

Scalability limitations restrict its effectiveness in managing extensive databases, especially compared to competitors like Oracle, causing some organizations to shift away from SQL Server.

Security features need enhancements as SQL Server is exposed to vulnerabilities and lacks adequate security governance, which is crucial for protecting data.

SQL Server Pros review quotes

PJ

Professional Services Manager at Business Intelligence DA

Feb 19, 2022

The technical support that Microsoft provides is great.

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reviewer1695144

President at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Nov 12, 2021

One of the things I most like about SQL Server is the log shipping piece. This is a great feature.

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HS

Works at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 23, 2021

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.

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Meindert Van Der Galiën

Information Technology Software Developer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 24, 2020

It's a good learning environment, it's easy enough to learn and understand. Anybody that picks up the language early on will be able to develop in it.

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Technical Lead at KPIT

Oct 28, 2021

SQL Server is quite user-friendly. I have experience with Oracle and PostgreSQL, so out of three, I like SQL Server a lot.

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reviewer1389651

Certified Adjunct Faculty, School of Engineering and Computing at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 26, 2020

It helps with moving the design of the database into reality.

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Solution architect at Rackspace

Mar 21, 2024

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.

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SS

Shivanshu Srivastav

IT Manager : HOD at Condot Systems

Oct 27, 2021

The replication feature, user interface, reporting services, and notification services are really good. They are providing SQL profiler and SQLCMD as their integrated software, so we don't find it difficult to integrate any of our third-party applications with MS SQL because all of them support MS SQL very clearly.

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reviewer1309482

Business Analytics Manager at a transportation company with 201-500 employees

Feb 2, 2021

The pricing of the solution is okay. It's less expensive than Oracle, for example.

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reviewer1652016

Senior Service Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 21, 2021

The solution is stable.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 226)

SQL Server Cons review quotes

PJ

Professional Services Manager at Business Intelligence DA

Feb 19, 2022

SQL Server doesn't have proper bitmap indexing, proper columnar databases, or proper implementation of materialized views.

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reviewer1695144

President at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Nov 12, 2021

In the next releases, I would only like more enhanced backups and more restore points.

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HS

Works at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 23, 2021

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.

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Learn what your peers think about SQL Server. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Meindert Van Der Galiën

Information Technology Software Developer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 24, 2020

From a development perspective, the solution needs to be a lot easier to understand or it needs to be easier to implement API packages for connection pooling so we don't have connection interruptions when, let's say, a hundred people simultaneously access the network on a given system, utilizing a specific or single database.

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Technical Lead at KPIT

Oct 28, 2021

It may be a licensing issue, but sometimes its operating speed becomes slow if we have multiple users. It's lacking some performance, but it's acceptable because we have a heavy load.

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reviewer1389651

Certified Adjunct Faculty, School of Engineering and Computing at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 26, 2020

The product overall would benefit from the addition of better tutorials to help master the skills necessary to actually build a project database. Right now, what is available isn't sufficient.

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Solution architect at Rackspace

Mar 21, 2024

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.

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SS

Shivanshu Srivastav

IT Manager : HOD at Condot Systems

Oct 27, 2021

Performance could be improved. There could be more support to PHP-based websites and to providing direct plugins for connections, and the related services or application services could be improved.

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reviewer1309482

Business Analytics Manager at a transportation company with 201-500 employees

Feb 2, 2021

Their datatypes need improvement.

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reviewer1652016

Senior Service Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 21, 2021

The performance is not always the best.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 216)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Relational Databases Tools

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Teradata vs SQL Server

MySQL vs SQL Server

Oracle Database vs SQL Server

SAP HANA vs SQL Server

MariaDB vs SQL Server

IBM Db2 Database vs SQL Server

Amazon Aurora vs SQL Server

CockroachDB vs SQL Server

LocalDB vs SQL Server

Citus Data vs SQL Server

IBM Informix vs SQL Server

Oracle Database In-Memory vs SQL Server

YugabyteDB vs SQL Server

SAP IQ vs SQL Server

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise vs SQL Server

See all alternatives

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