SQL Server Reviews

ERP Database.

Using the SQL queries, the user can quickly and efficiently retrieve a large number of records from a database. In standard SQL, it is very easy to manage the database system. It doesn't require a substantial amount of code to manage the database system. Long established are used by the SQL databases that are being used by ISO and ANSI. Using the SQL language, the users can make different views of the database structure.SQL has a difficult interface that makes few users uncomfortable while dealing with the database.

Microsoft database is very user friendly. This new version of SQL Server continues to meet these twin demands. It adds new features from the worlds of data science and NoSQL. It offers cross-platform capabilities and Docker container compatibility. But it also reinforces its investment in core database engine performance, ease of index maintenance, high availability, and data warehouse performance. That's a difficult balance and one that other database vendors don't have to meet. While this may be Microsoft's cross to bear, the company does pretty well with it, turning a formidable challenge into a positive market differentiator.

The latest version supports for big data analytics. SQL Server's vector processing-based batch execution mode is now available to the entire execution of R or Python code. Since much of the work that tends to be done in R and Python involves aggregation, batch mode - which processes rows of data several at a time, can be very helpful. Two other new batch mode features, memory grant feedback, and adaptive joins will enhance SQL Server's performance and efficiency as well. It is good to move from Microsoft to deal with big data analytics

CAL licenses should cost less. Microsoft usually prices high for client access licenses. Server plus user client access license (CAL) licensing requires a separate Server license for each server on which the software is installed, plus a user CAL for each user accessing the server. A SQL Server CAL is required for a user to access or use the services or functionality of either edition of SQL Server and frequent updates to the latest versions will lead to obsolete and discontinuing the security patches has to be improved.

Since two years

Very good stability with 250-300 users.

This product can withstand with 250-300 users.

Very good.

SQL standard 2008.

Straightforward - no complexity.

Vendor team with an in-house team.

2 years.

It is an overall very good product.

Our primary use case for this product is as a transaction database and for the provision of rational data through the application-based server. The main application of my current organization is pointing towards the SQL server database and some servers which are later used for data warehousing. So mainly we use it for transaction data and data warehousing. I'm the assistant manager and data administrator, and we are customers of SQL. 

Security is obviously the most valuable feature because I can provide certain logins for a particular level of security and I can provide specific permissions for certain logins. That's a very good feature. I like the user interface as well, it's easy to use. The SSMS Management Studio, which we use to do some work in database file query is a recent feature from 2018 and the SSMS is quite good. It has many features and it also shows the query statistics which I was not getting previously. The other feature I like is the query store which helped me a lot to analyze the data getting hit on the database. 

I'd like to see a simplification of the query optimizer and feel that SQL needs to look into the internal processing of the query because the query optimizer sometimes uses a different query plan, which we don't expect. It is similar to the triggers they have which are used after execution and not before. For example, if I'm running a query, my trigger will be run after the query has executed although I sometimes need the trigger before execution. That's a feature not supported by the product. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

It is quite scalable compared to other data engines and the latest version has increased support for new technologies, like Python and other languages. It's a big improvement on the previous version. We have 30 to 40 SQL servers installed and they're used for different different applications; internal applications, client applications as well as for ETA tools and reporting purpose. We probably have up to 200 users querying the SQL server of the product on a daily basis.

I'm satisfied with the technical support. Whenever a call is raised to Microsoft they see to it that all our questions are answered properly and in a timely manner. It doesn't take long for things to be resolved. 

The initial setup is very straightforward, just like any typical software where you just click next, next, next, next. You just need to know your environment properly and which exact features you need to install. Deployment takes max one to two hours to install on-premises. Depending on the environment and whether or not you're installing any cluster environment, it will take a couple of hours. To deploy a stand-alone SQL server doesn't take much time. 

I would recommend this solution, particularly for OLTP purposes, the transactional data purpose rather than for warehousing. For data warehousing I think there are better solutions but for the transaction data, for application purposes, SQL Server great.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We use SQL Server to ingest and to extract reports for multiple customers. 

SQL Server is cost effective in multiple ways - both the cost of software and the cost of the resource. Meaning, how many resources do we have and what is their expertise level? How easily can they use the SQL Servers or can I use any of the software? Do I need to hire somebody else from the outside to work on the cost?

The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to code. You can very easily get a resource to work on that. For example, if we have a big project it's hard to get a good resource in the IT industry. However, since SQL Server is the most popular solution, you can easily get resources to use it so the risk factors are very, very low. Even if someone leaves the company, you can easily replace them.

Additionally, it is very stable. 

You don't need to struggle for anything. Most of the codes are there.

In terms of what could be improved, everything on-premises is now moving to the cloud. Obviously SQL Server has also moved because Microsoft has its own cloud called Azure SQL and azure synapse. Every solution comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Each cloud has its own way to maintain resources and that plays a major role. But I would say that Azure Clouds are easy to work as compared to others. To  Performance-wise it's still not as good as on-premises, but it is easy to work with. For example, if you are familiar with the SQL server then you don't need to put any effort to work on the Azure SQL or Azure Synapse. Your efficiency will not decrease and you can easily manage any projects. Its advantage is that it is very similar. Apart from that, if you moving to any other Warehouse like Snowflake, redshift with existing SQL server resources is a little difficult and organizations need to spend money on their training. Which increases cost. 

I have been using SQL Server for almost 10 years.

We just use the on-premises SQL because we have our own server, and we use it on that.

It is stable.

SQL Server is scalable. We started with one hundred data points and now we have up to 1500, it's scalable. You just need to install the new version every time it comes out with a new capability, such as SQL Server 2019 where you can do multiple things.

If I'm talking about the on-premises maintenance requirement, we need a DBA for that if the SQL maintenance is required. But if you move to the cloud this is automatically done by Microsoft itself. however, this still requires some maintenance though.

Microsoft has one of the best supports. They are highly enlightened. It is a very mature product. Even if many times I feel I can do it myself, I choose to reach out to the support team because they have a large number of users and they outsource. You are definitely going to get the outcome you want.

It's hard to tell the exact reason of switching. As I told earlier, Choosing DB cannot be measured only on the performance of the Database. Multiple points need to be considered.

The initial setup is straightforward. Again, it's a mature solution, so it is very straightforward. You don't need to worry about that.

My advice is that this is the time to completely move to the cloud. If you have a golden or platinum partnership with Microsoft or you have good Microsoft resources then best is to move azure clouds. Azure DB services have been improved a lot in the past few years and it continually improving like others. 

They are trying to make it closer to the on-premises version. I know it cannot be exactly like on-premises but they can bring most important features. For example Azure brings SSIS features in ADF which solve lot of issues. Another example, Azure launch Snowflake connector with ADF which saves us to writing code in Azure function. 

At last in my view, you need to evaluate what exactly you are looking for and what type of resource do you have and what is the growth rate of your data. Do you have a direct partner with Microsoft? All things are interrelated and the decision has to depend on these.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SQL Server a Seven.

In my role as faculty, I would use it to facilitate having a database with all the teachers needed that are equivalent to Oracle as a database for a small scale project.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is that the metadata is just generalized. Metadata is the way that data is described both for technical aspects of building a database and for the user interfaces. Our metadata is the objects attached to the database, not in the software. 

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

The server itself doesn't need much improvement. 

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.

Overall, I would suggest a nice tight integration with the toolset now known as Power BI. It might not even be missing, however, I'm planning to concentrate a lot of my time with the tutorials and I have Power BI loaded onto my HP laptop. bA brilliant student did it for me when she demoed it in a class. I'm going to use that copy of it and have many tutorials to get ready. 

I have enough experience to support students and grad students who use it as a database backend to accomplish their projects.

I have to qualify my experience with "using" the solution. I have done not very much on my own individually or for a client using SQL Server. I have been supportive in the role of facilitator for students to succeed with it and to be observant of how it is very similar in conceptual important ways to my very deep experience with Oracle as the database backend.

That said, I've been familiar with the solution for about ten years now.

What I don't know yet is if it would be stable when being migrated from the scale of a project that would be in a prototype on a small machine, into a much larger environment in order to get ready to go to production. I'm not sure of that experience, whether it's vulnerable or not. I haven't tried it.

However, in my experience, so far, the solution is quite stable. In terms of stability, with Microsoft being so supportive of its success, and so many smart professionals who have the skillsets to use it, that it would be stable. I'm confident about that. It's not a new tool, so stable being defined as it doesn't break down.

In terms of scalability, with the right people supporting it, who have the skills to do so, it would scale up. It's likely to be true in the context of the overall tool called Power BI that Microsoft has released, and which has high credibility among Gardner Group and others about it being available for business intelligence.

The solution isn't used often or widely per se. Not many people, if any, use it regularly due to the fact that an instance of SQL Server is set up only to accomplish a project relevant to a course that needs to have a database. After that, it doesn't stick around. It doesn't last longer than that.

Previous to my position at the university, I worked both as an employee and a consultant and was very much involved with Oracle as a database for years, going back to 1997 and until about 2010.

The initial setup isn't complex. It's certainly straightforward. The downloads and the installs don't all fall apart. It succeeds. The constraint is in the context of the students enabling a SQL Server to run on a laptop. That's a constraint rather than on an actual problem with the hardware server itself. 

Deployment takes, on average, about four hours. After that, you have a somewhat bare-bones server with the capability of running SQL datum to create the data itself or to import it from another database.

Since the solution is only really used for training purposes for classes and isn't meant to exist permanently, there's no one who needs to really maintain it.

I don't recall any help from people in the university who had the knowledge to support a student who was doing it for the course I was teaching. Sometimes these students have plenty of experience in their own professional job and they bring it to class to help succeed with the effort.

I, unfortunately, do not handle licensing, so I don't know what the costs are for the product.

MySQL as a database is sufficient for the scale of the projects that I've been talking about for ht purposes we have currently. PostgreSQL, which I do not personally know very well, is something else we looked at. It's a matter of the scale, generally. When I'm teaching, I'm probably the only member of faculty teaching actual database design in our school of engineering. We only would work on something that I call prototyping. Nothing that would reach for the responsibility of becoming our actual production database. 

In August of last summer, we updated to the latest version of the solution. At least, at that time, it was the latest version.

What the school does in its academics is make a minimum training available for students who want to use it. They can learn how.

Now we're all online. I do not know if the University has SQL Server as the backend for any of its regular production databases. I think it only is a database for students to choose when they need one for a project.

I don't think it has extensive utilization. And in the teaching involved for online learning, I would probably express very lightweight recommendations to try it because we're not on campus. We cannot connect to a real server for a backend in order to do the install on onsite. This is just a COVID-19 in constraint.

If a company is considering utilizing this tool in the future, I would advise that they have someone on staff or in a consulting agreement who really knows the tool, and has succeeded with it.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's the right tool for production-ready or enabled databases. It's now equivalent to Oracle.

SQL Server is a highly stable solution.

The pricing and quality of the product could be improved.

I have been using SQL Server for more than 40 years.

I rate SQL Server a nine out of ten for stability.

Our clients for SQL Server are usually enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten for scalability.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.

Since SQL Server was one of the most commonly used products initially, it was very easy to use. I'm moving away from the solution because there are now better data storage tools. SQL Server was used for the postal service in the Netherlands, where the postal buses on the street were analyzed. SQL Server is always deployed on the cloud.

Data recovery and backup are sometimes hard with SQL Server because of the data store size. Based on the data structure, I would sometimes recommend the solution to other users.

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

The solution is used primarily for medium companies in vertical accounting applications. We use the solution as a good general-purpose database.

I value the ability it gives me to test on small machines and easily scale up to larger devices for live applications.

When we run into problems, it's usually during installation, and finding answers to the problem has been a nightmare because the documentation is terrible.

Likewise, I find the business reporting rather poor, and the solution doesn't work well as a data warehouse product. When I tried to use it as one, I did not find it very satisfactory.

I've used SQL Server for about 20 years, probably. I've used a number of different versions, including 2010 and 2007.

We have never had a stability problem.

We rarely have more than a few hundred users. It's more about the person using it since we don't have heavy, continuous use.

We've never had a sensible answer from technical support.

I have generally found implementing the solution easy. But when it comes to the time we took to implement the solution, the problem's always been the application and not the database. The solution is usually easy to implement because we use standard facilities. If you need something special, you run into all sorts of trouble because SQL Server gives you an awful lot of ability to change the settings.

We've used it as a development tool, and it's very cheap as a development tool. Besides, someone else has paid for it for my use, so it's a question of whether the cost suits the end user. The solution has a good midrange price for the applications in which we've used it. Oracle's pricing would raise more eyebrows, but SQL Server's pricing has proven satisfactory for our market range.

We mainly use SQL Server because it's cost-effective for our applications. We've occasionally tried other databases for various reasons. We've used the Sybase database, but the Sybase database is very close to SQL Server. We've also tried MySQL, but that was more of an exercise in porting than anything else. However, it's not a fair comparison because we had done the development on SQL Server and then used that as a porting exercise.

The solution's generally been easy to use for the general cases we've used. The solution has been satisfactory for the sort of applications we've used.

We've been very much middle of the road in using SQL Server. We don't use specialist, and we've tried to keep to standard SQL as far as possible. We don't use the clustering facilities or try to use any of the specialist facilities. We could drop it and switch to MySQL or another database if we had to. We are using SQL Server, not for the particular services it's got, but using it as a middle-range product. We're taking advantage of the fact that it runs on all sorts of platforms, and it's a good value development product that works very easily for us. We're not using it for some of the things Microsoft clients find particularly useful for. We're not high-intensity users. For people like us, it fits in very easily.

For our purposes, SQL Server is just about ideal. It's easy to use and fit. Some of the later versions, in particular, have been easy to use. We have had installation problems on some of the later versions, and the documentation is poor. I'll rate SQL Server a seven out of ten.

We use the product as a database for the applications. 

The tool helps us by being available always. 

We don't encounter any issues with the solution. 

The tool is expensive.

I have been using the product for the last ten years. 

The solution is stable. 

The tool is scalable. 

The tool is easy to install. 

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. 

I would rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. It is not extremely cheap but also it's not the most expensive product. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution to extract data. We have a partnership with Microsoft and I'm a solutions architect. 

This is a user-friendly solution. It's great that I can extract the data from the SQL server and store it in my local data source for BI purposes.

I think that performance could be improved and SQL presents some challenges for us.

The stability is good. 

We haven't faced any scalability issues. We have over 200 users. 

I interact with multiple data sources, multiple customers and their ERPs. It can be Oracle, SAP or MongoDB among other solutions. MongoDB, for example, is a little more complex than the SQL Server and we often have more of a challenge establishing a connection with MongoDB.

The initial setup is not a problem. 

This solution is moderately expensive. 

I can definitely recommend this solution to smaller and midsize organizations. I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We use this solution to store our data and for running queries, simple select queries that enable me to create the views I need and report from those views. I'm an ESM specialist and we are customers of SQL Server. 

I like the stability of the solution, the fact that you have two, three, four nodes replicating at any given time at different locations, and they're all synchronized; if one is lost it automatically moves to another. The other advantage here is that when it comes to application maintenance, you switch onto another node while you maintain another server and there's no downtime. 

The solution could have additional security. 

The solution is easily scalable because of its flexibility.

I don't do the installation, but it appears straightforward according to those who carried out the implementation. These days deployment takes about an hour. We have 1,200 or so users. With the onboarding of more customers, we'll be increasing our use of SQL Server. For now, we have one person dealing with maintenance. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We use SQL Server for developing systems.

The most valuable feature of SQL Server is the performance.

I have been using SQL Server for years.

We have approximately three people who are using this solution.

The technical support from Microsoft has been good.

The initial setup of SQL Server is straightforward.

We have two administrators that did the implementation of the solution.

The price of SQL Server could be reduced, the license is expensive. We have an annual subscription.

I would recommend SQL Server to others.

I rate SQL Server a seven out of ten.