SQL Server Reviews

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.

We primarily use the solution for our daily operations.

The solution has provided our clients with some valuable data feeds.

The performance is a very valuable aspect of the solution.

SQL is very easy to manage.

Occasionally the performance, as good as it is, is a bit off. We sometimes experience memory spiking. If they could maybe fix that aspect of the solution, that would be quite helpful for our organization.

We've been using the solution for more than ten years at this point.

The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had issues. We don't really experience bugs or glitches and haven't had the system crash on us before.

The scalability of the solution is very good. A company that needs to expand should be able to do so fairly easily.

We have about ten people using SQL at our organization. Some are in Operations. Some are developers.

The data we have is constantly expanding and growing for us, so we already are increasing the capacity of the SQL server. We'll continue to do so as necessary.

If we have any issues, we contact Microsoft. We only do so if something happens and we can't fix it ourselves. It hasn't happened too many times, and it usually doesn't revert to me to reach out, so although I know we have used them in the past, I myself have no direct experience dealing with them.

It's been about ten years since we started using SQL, which is quite a long time. I don't recall if we used a different solution before that or not. If we did, I don't know what it would have been.

I'm not sure how to answer as to if the solution is straightforward or complex in terms of setup. I didn't handle the deployment, so I'm not the person who would be best equipped to answer these types of questions.

I'm not the person that deals with billing and payments, so I don't know what the cost of the solution is, or if it is monthly or yearly billing. 

I'm not sure if we would have looked at something else or what it might have been. If there was research and a comparison was done, that would have been a decade ago. It's been a long time. 

We are using the 2008 and 2017 versions.

I'd like others to know that SQL is easy to use and easy to manage. It also offers pretty good performance, in my opinion.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's not too expensive, or at least that is my understanding, but I am aware there are lots of open source options out there as well companies may want to consider.

SQL Server is easy to manage. 

The tool needs to improve its pricing and technical support. 

I have been working with the product for ten years. 

I rate the product’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. 

I rate the tool's deployment a seven out of ten. Deployment time depends on the customer's environment. 

I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten.

Our clients are from small, medium, and enterprise businesses. It helps users to manage their data. 

I rate the overall product an eight 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. 

I'm a web developer, and I use SQL for the backend.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is its ease of use.

It's a pretty stable solution.

We found it to be quite scalable. 

While using it, we really didn't experience any pain points. It doesn't need any additional features. 

I have a couple of years of experience with the solution so far. 

The stability and performance are good. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's not buggy. there are no glitches. It's pretty reliable. 

The scalability has been good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

I've never used technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been satisfied with its overall capabilities in general.

We are an independent software vendor and users of this product. I'm a company founder. 

The most valuable feature for me is that the database engine is always on.

The solution is lacking a compound index for comparing values as you find in PostgreSQL. SQL Server doesn't support that feature so we need to build binary indexes to be able to compare those compound values. I'd also like to see AI capabilities. Oracle has a cloud solution which maintains its own indexes. If you buy a service from Oracle's cloud system, it keeps track of the queries that you have made to the database and it automatically implements its own indexes. It's such a good optimized database and I'd like to see an SQL Server that maintains its own indexes with AI capability. 

I have an issue with memory support: If you create a table and a third procedure followed by an additional procedure using that third procedure, and then wish to alter the original table with the two dependent objects, you have to drop those third procedures and alter the table and recreate dependencies. Those dependencies make it impossible to work in an online environment. If there's a problem, for example, in your implementation and you have to modify a production system, for example, it can't be done. SQL Server generates DLL files in this instance and you can't change DLLs of a running program. It should be easy for them to solve. 

I've been using this solution for 20 years. 

I have the issue of memory support but the solution is stable. 

For Turkey, the licensing costs are too high. Previously, independent software vendors like us would buy the license from Microsoft and resell to our customers.
For vendors it was half the retail price, but that's no longer possible. Sometimes enterprise companies buying in bulk can get licenses at a better price, but we don't have that and it's impractical for us to sell this solution. 

The solution doesn't have too many surprises and is easy to understand. It's all dependent on the architecture and implementation. Newer products use code-first solutions and I'm not sure people will continue to go down the SQL path. If I were starting my project now, I would have chosen another database. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

SQL is our main data store for enterprise applications, all applications that we have in the organization.

SQL could be improved by making all features available on the on-premise version of the product as well as the cloud version. When you buy the on-premise version, it's sort of an inferior product compared to the cloud version, which seems to get most of the latest and greatest features.

I've been using this solution for a few years.

SQL is stable.

This solution is scalable.

I am satisfied with Microsoft's technical support.

The initial setup was ok, it met our requirements.

We implemented SQL ourselves, and it took around a week to install.

Subscriptions are available on a yearly basis.

I would give SQL a score of nine out of ten.