SQL Server Reviews

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. 

There are three variations available within SQL Server, the first one being that you can migrate your SQL instances from an on-premises version to the cloud. Second, you have an option to modernize the SQL platform and move to managing instances on the cloud. Third, SQL Server has an offering called Azure SQL, where you can deploy Azure instances in a flexible manner, and it can automatically scale up or down, depending upon the requirements. There are specific features you can license, as per the CPU cores and transactions you deal with in your business. There are various models of the tool that are available.

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.

The tool is secure in nature. The security portfolios are changing day by day, and new security bugs are being released. The tool responds to users' requirements to deal with bugs and security issues. I feel that the tool should offer more security features to be made available. The security packages to be followed by users should be consolidated and sent to customers every day or every week so that they can have the security features updated. If security packages are available in a consolidated manner every month, it will be beneficial. I think there are certain areas of concern regarding the backup of the product that I have heard from my company's engineers. 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. The tool has to be user-friendly- in terms of supporting the backup features and adapting to various backup environments.

I have been using SQL Server for 5 years.

It is a very stable solution. Hundreds and thousands of customers have adopted SQL Server since it is a very stable solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company deals with organizations where the solution is used, with between 200 and 7,000 users.

The solution's technical support is available twenty-four hours, seven days a week, with the specific SLAs associated with the product. Apart from Microsoft, there are hundreds of solution integrators and managed service providers available worldwide who provide support for SQL servers.

The product's initial setup phase is very straightforward and nothing complex. Anybody who has a basic knowledge of SQL and Azure should be able to deploy the product.

SQL Server has a clear set of procedures to help users deploy the product. Initially, to identify your sizing or capacity requirements, after which you pick up the right setup from the cloud and then configure it with the right level of storage and the right level of CPU and memory before choosing the version of SQL you want to deploy, post which you will be ready to use the tool.

You can opt for a pay-as-you-go model, which allows you to pay as per your usage, which is a little expensive. You also have the option to purchase for a period of a year or three, which comes with discounted pricing. Depending upon your usage, you can use the pay-as-you-go model for a short period of time. For longer projects, we can opt for one-year or a three-year license.

Speaking about a project where SQL Server was essential in archiving our company's objectives, I feel that customers generally like to optimize their licenses while making sure they get the right level of operational excellence out of it. When you run the tool on an on-premises version, you are dependent upon operational resources or human resources to manage it. When the tool is in the cloud, it is managed by Azure, where you can optimize or effectively use your resources, which can provide you with cost advantage or cost optimization. As the tool is flexible in nature, you don't have to monitor it all the time for performance and capacity issues. The tool automatically scales and provides you with the required level of scalability, and it also has built-in DR and business continuity features. Even in the case of a disaster, it automatically moves to a DR location and provides you with the right level of business continuity and availability.

The product has built-in scalability features. Depending upon the number of transactions or usage, it automatically scales itself. You can also define specific parameters for how the tool needs to scale or how to respond to the requirements of the users. The tool has a good amount of scalability features.

Azure provides funding for doing a PoC, so if you are a little apprehensive about using it, then you can reach out to a local Azure partner, who will be able to help you with providing the funding from Azure. Azure's funding part is valid for a period of two to three weeks, so you can actually deploy it and play around to ensure that you are comfortable with what you are doing. Once you are satisfied with the results of the tool, you can go ahead and migrate or modernize your databases. I suggest others use the funding from Azure so that you can get a touch and feel for the product.

SQL Server comes under the category of enterprise tools. Most enterprise tools have connectivity available. If there is no connectivity available in the enterprise tools you use, you can develop APIs to integrate with other tools.

The benefits attached to the solution revolve around the fact that it offers scalability and reliability. The tool also helps with fault tolerance while offering business continuity features. The tool offers its users a fully secure environment. In banking, federal government, or insurance firms, I feel that the tool ensures that its users are fully secured, and you can apply whatever regulatory governance you want to apply to the tool.

 I rate the tool a nine 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.

Most of our clients use SQL Server as a back-end source.

Agent service is a good feature of SQL Server, where you can schedule certain tasks. The solution's encryption feature allows the data to be encrypted while transferring from one place to another. The solution's performance and speed are also good. Indexing and Magic Tables are very good features of SQL Server. We have a different transition style with the solution.

SQL Server is an expensive solution, and its pricing should be reduced.

I have been using SQL Server for 18 years.

SQL Server is a highly stable solution.

The solution’s performance and scalability are very good. Our clients for SQL Server are enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution a 9 out of 10 for scalability.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution can be deployed within a few minutes.

SQL Server is an expensive solution.

On a scale from 1 to 10, when one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a 9 out of 10.

The solution has a good data recovery feature. There are a lot of ways you can recover data. You can manage the recovery, resilience, and disaster management with SQL Server. I would recommend SQL Server to other users because it's easy to use, stable, and has a lot of features. The solution is suitable for different types of companies as per the requirement, including small, medium, and large enterprises.

Overall, I rate the solution 10 out of 10.

We use the solution to install different databases.

We were using SQL Server as a major database in our organization. We partitioned the data in such a way for a more extended period, and our archival process may manage that.

We mostly use linking servers and several applications; one pulls data from another. Thus, we created a Linked Server and implemented a replication algorithm to facilitate data transfer between different sources.

The solution’s pricing and integration could be improved.

I have been using SQL Server for 20 years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a 9 out of 10.

More than 1000 concurrent users are using this solution. We use horizontal and vertical data partitioning, allowing us to manage and distribute data across tables efficiently. Additionally, we use sharding for certain databases to handle large datasets effectively.

Support is good. We never had any problem with the support.

Compared with other databases like Oracle, SQL Server stands out due to its robust parallel processing capabilities. It is well-suited for handling large volumes of data. Oracle is preferred in enterprise scenarios with big databases because of its support.

The initial setup is easy and takes around 15-20 minutes.

We use data instances to deploy SQL Server in some cases. We had the static deployment.

We used Windows authentication to ensure more secure communication with the server. The entire request was encrypted with a server certificate, providing point-to-point security for our application. Additionally, when storing sensitive information such as credit card details or specific premises, we ensured it was encrypted in transit and at rest.

The SQL Server interface is better than that of Postgres.

We needed query optimization and data analysis to enhance query performance. Based on the database, there were many stable participants when the load was very high. We marked some of the queries for optimization to achieve better performance. We devised a plan, including creating more indexes, to improve the overall performance of the SQL Server. These were the steps we took to enhance the performance of the SQL server.

It is more compatible with customer service than any other database.

Overall, I rate the solution a 9 out of 10.

We extracted data from SAP and stored it in SQL Server. We created a connection between the Data Services Server and the SQL Server. If anything went wrong, there were SQL Server experts who took care of everything. So, we extracted data from our ERP system and stored it in SQL Server.

Whenever we had to restore the data, it was not as difficult as restoring the database to any other RDBMS. The restoration of data is very easy compared to any other database. The solution is very intuitive and easy to use. It is one of the best relational database systems in the market. The restore and backup strategy was not complicated. The ease of use was excellent compared to any other databases.

The performance degrades when the data is huge. It also degrades when there is a flux of data.

I used the solution for four to five years.

The tool is stable. I rate the stability a seven out of ten.

The tool is pretty scalable. We had 100 users in our organization. We can scale the tool vertically and horizontally.

SQL Server is the best database when the data is not huge or when we know that the data is coming in at a specific rate. I rate the integration of the product with SAP BusinessObjects Data Services nine out of ten. It is easy. We did not come across any issues or delays. Every organization uses Microsoft. SQL Server is one of the oldest RDBMSs on the market. It is easy to use and intuitive. A lot of people know about it. The ease of use is greater than any other server in the market. Overall, I rate the solution an eight and a half out of ten.

SQL Server is essentially the backbone of every microservice. From a developer's perspective, it is the backbone of all microservices. The tool enables data retrieval, set data, and essential operations, ensuring the smooth functioning of applications. In essence, it is the integral part that keeps applications operational.

The solution's security features are good. 

The GUI  needs improvement. From a technical perspective, it's quite complex, which may not be a problem for individuals with technical backgrounds like ours, especially since we've encountered similar interfaces. However, navigating the GUI can be challenging for newcomers or product owners without technical experience. For example, as someone transitioning from a developer role to a product management role, I find it relatively easy to use the GUI. But for those without a technical background, it's much more challenging to grasp what's happening. 

I have been using the product for six years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

The solution's scalability and performance depend on application size and data size. Overall, the performance is pretty good and decent. My company has 20-30 users. 

I haven't contacted the technical support. Our DBA manages it. 

SQL Server is easy to deploy. A five-member technical team maintains it. 

I rate SQL Server a nine out of ten. It is robust, secure, scalable, and can store data. It can handle multiple users with good customer support. We have integrated it with IDE and Git. 

There are no specific use cases attached to the solution. From an academic point of view, I make the tool available to the students for some training or tests. I also used it to compare the functionalities of Oracle Data Integrators with other data integration systems.

I can't comment on the valuable features of the product right now since I recently downloaded some whitepaper and manuals. I downloaded the documentation related to the tool, but I haven't used much of the system. I know that SQL Server is a good system, based on a report I read on the Gartner website.

The interface of the tool has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required.

I have been using SQL Server for ten to twenty years.

It is a stable solution.

I haven't tested the system for scalability. I use it for simple tasks.

As per our company's agreement with Microsoft, some of the software from Microsoft 10 was included in SQL Server when there were about 1,000 students attending database classes using it.

The product's initial setup phase was simple.

There were no specific projects for which I used the tool. I conduct classes related to data integration. I need to use some products attached to the data integration area having a Python framework. I wanted to compare the tool with some commercial tools such as Oracle Data Integrator.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

SQL Servers and Power BI Report Servers can integrate well.

I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.