SQL Server Reviews

We use this solution to analyze the profitability of sales.

Within our organization, there are roughly 30 people using the analysis services solution from the Business Intelligence side.

The performance can be great. Tuning and understanding SSAS is not straightforward.

The issue is that Microsoft is not really supporting the Multi Dimensional Analysis Services feature any longer and it's looking very obsolete. We're looking at replacing it.

SSAS-MD is difficult to make changes. It's a very complicated product in general — that's the issue. It is too complicated for most. It's too difficult to change. It's too difficult!

I have been using this product for more than 10 years.

This particular product is quite stable. We've not had any particular problems. We've had problems with Microsoft Excel recently, but Analysis Services has been quite stable.

Scalability-wise, it's quite good. It's not scalable up to the big data type of thing that people are doing now. It's scalable up to a point, but it has been overtaken by newer products.

We try and avoid calling Microsoft support, generally. That's the truth. We've tried getting support for other products like Power BI — support is an issue.

They're changing their products and they're not stable enough. Analysis Services has been okay, but some of their other products, like Excel and Power BI, are not stable.

We're looking at alternative solutions because we think Microsoft's licensing costs have been expensive and multidimensional cubes have been overtaken by other technologies such as in-memory databases and products like Snowflake.

We're looking for a solution that allows us to pay by usage rather than pay by the number of users. We don't want to pay for hardware capacity that we rarely use. I'm looking at several products, including Snowflake, that bill by how much we use the product. I'm not sure if Microsoft is on board with that yet. I was also looking at Qlik — they do a commercial model that is paid by the amount of time. I think paying per usage is a rising trend at the moment.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give SQL Server a rating of nine. It's generally a good product.

If you're interested in using this solution, my advice is to do your research. It's a good product, but there are other products available.

One of the biggest issues that I have with Microsoft is that they change their products and don't continue to support the old product. We've got some things in Microsoft Excel that are no longer supported. They bring out a new model and they drop support for some of the older features.

We use SQL Server for database integration as we sometimes use queries to take information from the database. For example, if I need a couple of information that is archived or not indexed, I will inform the SQL Server team to help.

I use the menu on the management view credit section to get information from the database.

I have been using SQL Server for eight to ten years, but I still check Google for things that aren't clear to me. For service delivery, we use on-premises solutions for our customers.

We don't use SQL Server as our primary product. Our focus is on safe customer SQL admin as we don't want problems with customer data in our system.

I think we consulted once for support in the active directory. We requested the support of Integration Engineers for installation, and their service was very good. However, in the last eight years, we have also used Microsoft support with satisfaction.

For the initial installation process, I did an installation for database testing using SQL Server Express. Sometimes, the trials for the samplers are not allowing the SQL Server Express. So, when I was doing the installation, I just selected database management because it isn't the default and it has helped me not to fill out the same details for future use.

I cannot answer that question concerning pricing and licensing because I'm just a technical staff member. However, we are just a customer of Microsoft and some of our clients say SQL Server is very high in price.

SQL Server is a very good product and we use Microsoft SQL Server software that runs on Windows as most of our clients make use of the Windows operating system. But I don't have a hundred percent trust in Microsoft products. Why am I saying that? This is not a security issue. I am just... We are hitting this kind of issue because, as you know, Windows servers sometimes get corrupted or we need to restart them.

The most valuable feature is easy installation. It was very easy to install.

The interface is very user-friendly.

I would like to see more integration with other products and it needs to be more secure.

I have been using SQL Server for two months and I believe that we are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution. It's very stable.

It is a scalable solution.

My installation requires SQL Servers, so I have to continue using them.

I have not contacted technical support.

Previously, we did not use another product.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation was easy.

It took two hours to deploy.

I completed the implementation myself.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate SQL Server an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as a relational database system.

The solution offers very high performance.

It is a very reliable solution. We find it to be quite stable.

We've found the product to be very scalable, specifically from MSSQL. 

The product offers various deployment models.

The Message Broker portion of the solution is not very scalable in comparison to the rest of the solution. The problem is, you can exclude that portion.

The Task Scheduler has a lot of shortcomings. This could be improved quite a bit.

The enterprise version of the product should be more cost-effective.

We've been using the solution for the last 15 or so years. It's been a while. We have a lot of experience with it.

The stability of the product is very good. It offers excellent performance. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is extremely scalable. If a company needs to expand, it can do so without any problems.

The enterprise version of the solution needs to be priced more competitively.

We have a couple of models. We lease through Azure monthly, which is for the Standard version. We have had to purchase the Enterprise version to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, which is just ridiculous.

On top of that, there aren't really any other knock-on costs.

We have experience with almost every angle of Microsoft ecosystem that you could imagine.

We're a direct customer. We own a MSSQL server. We have it deployed both on-premises and on the cloud, so we use different deployment models. We have distinct instances in the cloud and we have distinct instances in our on-prem.

I would warn other organizations to not use their Message Broker and don't rely on their Task Scheduler. Look elsewhere. Go look at Oversource, Rabbit MQ, Azure Message Broker, or something other than what's built into Microsoft's SQL server. That would be my advice.

Our original architecture messaging infrastructure was based on Microsoft SQL server's Message Broker. It's been a complete disaster. It's a black hole that can't be diagnosed or supported in terms of troubleshooting from Microsoft when it doesn't work. When it doesn't work, it just doesn't work and no one can answer why. That is very bad. The intended use of it was for enterprise messaging. However, that is not a use case for MSSQL Message Broker, period. We're in the process of moving in a couple of directions. We're going to move to Azure Service Bus as an interim solution, as our current technical capabilities are very Microsoft-centric. Then, the next step will be to move to other more enterprise-class messaging and queuing subsystems like RabbitMQ.

The SQL server as an engine probably deserves a very high nine out of ten. It's a very, very efficient relational database management system. And it is very scalable.

We use SQL Server to store, retrieve, and manage data.

This product works well, serving as our operational database.

The interface is user friendly.

Better integration with other platforms would be an improvement.

I have been using SQL Server for almost two years.

We have had no issues with stability.

This is a scalable product. It is being used in three or four projects with a total of between 50 and 100 people.

I have not been in contact with technical support for this project, but we use the Microsoft communities to get answers to questions that we have. For example, we have checked the settings to make sure that we are safe.

Overall, the support is pretty good.

The initial setup is definitely straightforward and can be completed within a couple of minutes.

The installation and initial setup were completed by our admin team. However, there are some drivers and additional components that I installed myself.

We always like to work with the best products, we are happy with SQL Server, and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Its speed and the ease of server management are valuable. If I compare Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, what I like in Microsoft SQL Server is the speed. We are using Microsoft Management Studio for managing our Microsoft SQL Server, and the user interface that I get to work with is also better.

There should be more tools and documentation for tuning the performance of Microsoft SQL Server. It would be nice to have more tools for tuning because currently, all the tuning that we have to do with our databases is almost manual. We have to read a bunch of knowledge base articles, and this information should be better documented.

Its free text search should also be improved. It is quite important for us. Currently, we're developing our own free text search because of the lacking flexibility in Microsoft SQL Server. Therefore, we're kind of using elastic search and making different implementations in order to reach our targets. Using just the native free text search of Microsoft SQL Server is not enough for us. It should have more flexible features as compared to the current version.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years. Our clients are using its multiple versions, starting from SQL Server 2012.

It is stable.

In general, it is scalable, but we are only using the single-server mode. We are not using any kind of clustering. Therefore, I cannot say anything from my personal experience about the scalability of Microsoft SQL Server.

I do not have any experience with Microsoft support. We either use in-house knowledge professionals or third-parties for consulting services.

Its initial setup is quite straightforward. A major upgrade is a bit more complicated. We had some issues with the upgrade.

I would recommend this solution. It is a good choice in terms of price and quality.

I would rate Microsoft SQL Server an eight out of ten.

Our server projects are mostly related to SQL Server, and we're using it. All our healthcare projects are using the SQL Server, and we're able to load millions of data without any issues.

It's more user-friendly than most databases. If we don't have to use the command mode, it's very easy.

The performance could be better. When we pump in millions of records, we start struggling, and that's why we want improvement in those areas.

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

In the past, it wasn't stable compared to other products like Oracle Db2, but it has improved, and now it's stable. 

The installation is easy, and performance-wise it's okay now.

SQL Server installation is easy, and we did it by ourselves.

I would recommend this product to new users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft SQL Server an eight.

The solution is our main database and stores our data at the organization. We're a Microsoft shop. That's why it's the main database. We have licenses for the servers. The only reason I'm using that is that that's what we have. However, I don't actually like working with it.

The solution works. It does what you need it to do.

Their integration, SSRS and SSIS tools are really good. The flow is great.

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

It's night and day if you compare it to Oracle, and I am an Oracle fan.

Their datatypes need improvement. The SQL Server language in itself, its datatypes, seem like they are stuck in the eighties. Even companies that work with an SQL Server, experts on J.D. Edwards that sits on SQL Server that handles all the data transformation, they've actually converted the SQL Server datatypes so that they are more useful and easy to handle on their solutions. That tells you right then and there that their datatypes must improve.

When you run your SQL optimizer there, on the datatypes, it's very costly because it's just this level of conversion that needs to happen as opposed to just calling it numeric, or as opposed to calling it something else. Their datatypes technically work. If you know what you're doing, it really can give you all that. However, on the optimization side, on the performance side, it does struggle.

The datatype conversion to push my data to an enterprise data warehouse is difficult. I can tell you Oracle data is so much easier to ingest into it and it easier than doing it on a SQL Server.

There are many issues that I face when I'm pulling data straight from a SQL Server agent. There are more collections that I need to do or handle before it hits my target table. I noticed that due to the fact that I've been working on different databases and ingesting everything in a data warehouse. It just doesn't flow properly.

Even on their SQL Studios, that Master Studio tools, even if you try to do your conversions on their own, even though this is their native tool, you're always going to have some problems and it's always going to give you some type of error. It is just difficult to tell you what the error will be. You have to dig in and figure it out. Most of that is due to datatypes. It's just not easy. It's like pulling teeth. Especially if you have had experience using a tool, like Oracle, that is just not that painful.

There seems to be a lot of patching, which leads me to believe there may often be stability issues.

I haven't used the solution for too long. I've used it here at the company for two years.

The stability is more on the IT side. I have not paid attention to that as I'm outside the SQL Server. My enterprise data warehouse is not on a SQL Server. Once I get the data, I don't know what's happening in that space. It's not my realm anymore. I know they patch a lot. That gives me a hint that the solution has its issues with bugs. I can't really say if it's stable or not, however, I'm leaning towards no.

I have no personal experience dealing with technical support directly. I can't speak to their responsiveness or level of knowledge.

I'm a big fan of Oracle, which I have worked with for 18 years. Comparing the two is like comparing the iOS of Apple versus Windows. They're two very different systems and typically you either like one or the other.

The solution doesn't cost as much as Oracle. Oracle is more expensive. That's always been the complaint with Oracle. They're very good, however, they're the most expensive out there and that's how they're losing business right now. Their big jump in the cloud happened way too late in the game, and everybody just jumped on the cloud due to high costs. If you were to compare pricing, SQL Server is much cheaper.

I'm currently moving away from the solution.

I'm an Oracle guy, so SQL Server is new to me. I don't like it. I'm moving away from it.

If you're a Microsoft shop, definitely SQL Server is the right solution for you. If you're used to it, it definitely makes sense as an option. It's nice. It works. If you have not seen the other side of things, then you might like it. As long as you're staying in the Microsoft world, it works. However, it's very clunky. From an analytics perspective, a data handling perspective, it is clunky. That is why I decided to go to Tableau instead of Power BI. There are just too many dependencies on the ecosystem. Once you get ingested into that SQL Farm, it's hard to leverage other tools that are disrupting the industry as you're just stuck in that ecosystem.

That's an issue with Oracle as well. That's just Microsoft and Oracle. They're pretty much the same. They're an enterprise solution. And there's an advantage when you're inside an enterprise using all these different services, and the tools that they have. There's definitely a huge advantage in that, however, it's limiting. If you look at Tableau Oracle would say, "We have our OBIE" and Microsoft would say that "we have a SSRS." 

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