SQL Server Reviews

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.

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.

We use SQL Server to store applications. The SQL Server manages various functions, such as digital innovation projects, document storage, handling login credentials, and maintaining authentication and authorization through the database.

Unlike MySQL, SQL Server is advantageous because it allows the execution of stored procedures and commands. It's easy to understand, run, and manage. Also, Microsoft frequently updates SQL Server, quickly resolving issues in new versions.

I have been working with the product for three years. 

My team has five users. 

The tool's deployment is easy. 

SQL Server offers three versions. You can get a free trial for 30 days. 

The solution is easy to understand if you know basic queries. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use SQL Server to host our ERP system. It serves both as the underlying database and server application software. This database solution handles all our ERP calls.

We use SQL Server to support Business Intelligence. It also connects with Power BI. We create all our views and datasets in SQL, specifically for Power BI. Previously, we used Tableau but transitioned to Power BI for all our analytics needs.

SQL Server provides access to audio information and audio tables. You can customize and create views. The ability to customize and upload these services is uncertain when migrating, but SQL in a local environment or Azure seems suitable for now. The ability to see tables, reviews, and custom script options is good.

The upgrades are unstable.

I have been using SQL Server for several years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The support is pretty good. We have never had to reach out to Microsoft for issues. It is a pretty solid application.

The initial setup is straightforward. You need to install technical agents and create databases.

We use Active Directory authentication. If you have access to the database, it's secure. Not everyone with access to the database can access it. Only our IT staff or those who require access have permission. It does offer a high level of control and security.

We have a small team. We could explore Azure Virtual Desktop or engage with local partners if we need additional technical knowledge. We employ a cloud gateway, enabling our SQL database to be somewhat cloud-based. This facilitates integration with various cloud applications, such as the Power Platform. We use Power Apps and Power Automate, allowing us to connect to our database in adaptable and scalable ways.

I recommend the solution if it meets your requirements.

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

We use the solution for data quality purposes like checking, testing, and writing its cases using data validity and quality measurements.

The valuable features are Excel integration, writing a query in SQL Server, exporting the data, and copying the data.

When transferring data from the SQL Server to Excel, the data types are not copied correctly. This issue might be associated with the formatting of the data types. Specifically, the data types for dates and timestamps have not been copied correctly.

In SQL, as with other databases, abbreviations are commonly used to simplify tasks such as writing queries or commands.

I have been using SQL Server for 3 years. We are using V18.0 of the solution.

The product is stable. The community is big.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

The data warehouse engine should be scalable.  It's not scalable. We use it every single day.

I rate the solution's scalability a three out of ten.

I have used Oracle Server.

The initial setup is straightforward. The connection to the database is not straightforward. There are many ways to connect to the database. It may be tricky to choose which way to connect.

I rate it seven or eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

The solution is good for a transaction database, but its performance is not very good. One or two persons are needed to maintain an SQL server.

I recommend the solution.

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

We use SQL Server for data warehousing or business-intelligent projects. When you leverage the solution with Azure, it's the only database you'll ever need. Oracle is overpriced, but Azure SQL and on-premise SQL are both great products.

The fact that SQL Server fully integrates within the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a plus.

The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on.

I have been using SQL Server for 25 years.

SQL Server is a stable solution.

Compared to other solutions like MongoDB and MySQL, SQL Server is a scalable solution.

The solution’s technical support is okay.

Positive

Oracle is an expensive relational database, and its configuration can be overly complicated. Oracle is less user-friendly. MySQL is not a relational database, but it's a flat-file database. MongoDB is a free tool that allows you to get what you pay for.

The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on. It could be complex, but any database platform will have some complexity.

Historically, SQL Server has been much more affordable than Oracle, which is overpriced.

SQL Server can be used for web applications and Dynamics Business Central. Any Azure app will deploy some element of SQL Server. The solution's security features meet our data protection requirements. SQL Server integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Entra, making it secure. However, since SQL Server is the most popular product, it's also the most popular platform to be hacked.

The solution's data analysis capability, performance monitoring, and error logging are all pretty good. I would recommend SQL Server to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution ten 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.

I work as a BI specialist, so I am directly using SQL Server since I am using the database and making reports from it via SSAS.

I use SQL Server daily for data analysis using its database capabilities and reporting via SSAS. It is easy to use for a BI specialist.

It can be better if it enables the use of AI functions. I used to work with Alteryx, and it has an analytical platform that was best for working directly from a database with machine learning algorithms. So, it would be better, I think.

I have been using SQL Server for around three years.

I would rate the stability around nine or ten. I have not encountered any problems with it.

I used to work with Dataiku, however, I switched jobs. I used to work as a developer for Dataiku, and now I am working as a BI specialist.

I think it is not easy to work with date types when compared to Oracle. Oracle is more useful, but I do not know which feature is better for SQL Server.

I deploy all packages myself and use SSIS for that. We are creating stored procedures and triggering some jobs in SQL Server. I did the deployment by myself.

I am unable to determine any ROI since I have always used SQL Server and cannot compare it with other tools.

I have previously worked with Dataiku.

Based on my experience, SQL Server is a common tool and does not offer significantly higher benefits or anything too special. It is easy to use, and I would recommend it to others. 

I would rate it around five on a scale of one to ten.