SQL Server Reviews

We do backups or restore or query tables to create the views, create some triggers to send the attachment report files, and to report on data.

It makes managing the database easy. Backups are very quick.

Sometimes we experience issues with its stability.

I have experience with SQL Server for 3-4 years. 

Sometimes we experience issues with its stability.

Five thousand users are using the solution. 

The initial setup is easy. Fifteen twenty minutes required for deployment. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

The product enables us to grant access to users. The product is easy to use.

The pricing could be better.

I have been using the solution for about four years.

We did not have any issues with stability. The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. Four other users have access to the server. We are not planning to increase the usage.

The setup is straightforward. The deployment does not take very long.

We did not use an integrator for the deployment. Our in-house team has been able to deploy the tool well.

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

I recommend the solution to others. The solution is straightforward to work with. Overall, I rate the product a nine 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 do data warehousing on it. We have databases on it. A lot of our applications use it for transactions and data.

We're using version 2019. We're trying to migrate to 2021 because 2023 is not yet that stable.

It works fine in terms of performance and stability.

I would like Microsoft to evolve SQL Server because stateful databases dying are in a way. We would like to find out if it can absorb Hadoop and other similar things. They should make it useful for data mining. Data is evolving forever, and how we store it is also changing constantly. So, SQL Server also needs to change.

I have been using this solution for two decades.

It works fine. There are no issues.

It is scalable. There are a lot of users. There are over 300 applications using this solution. Each application has its own users. In the technical team, there are about 13 people working with it.

I logged a ticket recently when I had an issue with the data manager. Their support wasn't that bad. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

I've used different solutions. There are times when I use Db2, and there are times when I use Oracle Database. Oracle beats SQL Server when it comes to procedures and process optimization.

The initial setup is easy. It takes 30 minutes at the most. What limits you is just your infrastructure in terms of:

• Do you have enough room on those servers to process that stuff?
• Do you have enough RAM resources?
• Do you have enough storage?
  

I can do it by myself.

It is annual.

I would recommend it to other users. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We have a large amount of information and data. We are using a lot of business models for our menu mix.

Because we are using the solution from an analytics perspective, the performance is good. We have a large amount of information in our dashboard. The data navigation could be improved.

We are using the net for our environment. We're using the ADF Azure data factory for our analysis services, and it is pretty good.

Something that could be improved is the cost because it's very high. That's the only thing I'm concerned about but the technology is good. We are looking forward to getting some discounts because we have a large amount of data.

I have been using this solution for three and a half years. The solution is deployed on a public cloud. Azure is the cloud provider.

It's much more stable. It's good. We haven't had any downtime during the past two years. The solution has gone down maybe once.

It should be scalable within the coming years because data is growing and the business is growing.

Right now we have about 300 users, but by next year we might have around 2,000 because we also have a retail side, which could also use the platform. Some of their roles are in the executive layers and the managers layers, and reporting line people also.

We are planning to increase the usage. This is a transformation phase, so we are currently using SAP business objects, and we are on the Oracle database. We just moved to Azure cloud with the data warehouse and Power BI tools.

My team works with support. As far as I know the technical support is good, but occasionally it takes a little bit of time.

Previously, I was using SAP, which is good. The technology is great. It has many more features than Microsoft SQL, like the data architect and performance.

My plan was to use SAP HANA, but we had an acquisition in our company, so we got a new team and new managers. The head of BI decided to go with Microsoft, however, my POC was already accepted with SAP HANA and AWS cloud hosting. We went in the other direction and started using SQL because the people who were hired were more familiar with the Microsoft technology rather than SAP. 

It is mostly straightforward. There were no issues. It takes about two or three months to prepare. Development takes another three months. It takes almost one year to just kick off the project with live production.

For deployment and maintenance, we used seven or eight people. Most of them were developers and DBAs, and some of them were business analysts.

We used in-house developers and had some consultation from Microsoft.

There is a return on investment because based on analytics, we are reducing the number of people who are doing the analytical part so that it's an automated process, and the data will be available to everyone, including business users.

Licensing fees increase depending on size and performance. If you want higher performance, you should go for a different course.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10. 

My advice is to know your use case and requirements so that you aren't surprised after deciding to get this product and realizing in the implementation that you need much more space. You at least need to make a massive POC to know if the product will give you 100% what you need.

We use Microsoft SQL Server as our main database. We implement our solutions to the client site, providing the machines and the SQL Server license depending on their requirements.

The SQL Server is being deployed on-prem. Most of our clients are from the pharmaceutical industry. If there is a physical database, they want a self-hosted server always on-premises. However, the market is slowly adapting to cloud servers. Scalability and security have increased, so now people are going with cloud servers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Most of our clients are hosted on-premises and they have their own server, so we don't go with any cloud server. However, we are planning to move ahead with cloud servers for many of our clients.

The replication feature, user interface, reporting services, and notification services are really good. They are providing SQL Profiler and sqlcmd as their integrated software, so we don't find it difficult to integrate any of our third-party applications with MS SQL because all of them support MS SQL very clearly. As a part of optimization, it is good for processing huge amounts of data.

Performance could be improved. There could be more support toward PHP-based websites and toward providing direct plugins for connections, and the related services or application services could be improved. The user interface could be improved so that someone with less knowledge could easily integrate and use that particular module software.

In the next release, I would like to see a separate tool provided to schedule backup or implement backup solutions on any of the servers that Microsoft has installed. This would be a small utility which I could open and point out the backup parts as well as the type of backup I want. Once I decide the time and set it up, it should be able to connect everything and then accordingly run that back up on an automated basis. 

Right now, people are making their own utilities to do that same thing, but it would be helpful if we could get it directly from Microsoft. Apart from this, it would be helpful to have small plugins or API-based connections, which could be used for integrating MS SQL with different platforms.

I have been using MS SQL Server for 11 years, from the very first day of my job. MS SQL is widely used because its compatibility is good, especially with the .NET Framework because most are Microsoft products. The integration and the response are good, especially if you have huge amounts of data.

Now in the market, there are NoSQL options like MongoDB and Hadoop. Previously, there were pretty much three main databases: MS SQL, Oracle, and MySQL. MySQL was mostly used for small software, but many enterprise software were using MySQL because of the configuration, the compatibility, and the performance.

If you're using platforms like ASP.NET and C#, then you will want MS SQL Server because enterprise-level Microsoft provides many features like analytics services, reporting services, notification services, and now they're providing Microsoft Azure integration services.

MS SQL is very stable. However, the corruption of databases needs to be handled more accurately. If I'm using MS SQL Server and my server accidentally restarts or one of my machines restarts accidentally, then usually the MDB or the MDF file is corrupted. That corruption of files should be handled more efficiently because the client loses most of the data. Of course, the backup plan should be more efficient, putting less load on the server. That needs to be improved and more optimized.

Scalability is good. We have worked on almost 25 loads of data and 35 loads of records in a month. Most were working fine, but after time the process slows down a bit. In MS SQL, the initial 70% would work fine, but when the database starts and the load gets full, it causes slow processing. But considering the cost, features, and compatibility with Microsoft, it's a very stable database.

I have not been in a situation where I required help directly from MS SQL Server because we have our own service team that handles those issues.

Initial setup was a bit complex, but it's doable because it has improved a lot. Previously, it was very hard to install MS SQL. If I had the 2016 version already installed, it allowed me to install 2018 as well. The report features were distributed between two services, and that's where it causes problems.

We implement our solutions to the client site.

For personal websites and personal software that isn't used by more than 100 people, I will always go for MySQL for two reasons: MySQL is free and the enterprise is very low in cost.

Oracle Enterprise is another option, but the cost is high when you consider that MySQL is free.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10. 

Microsoft's modules are really good. The syntax used for running the query is really easy. Their options for concurrency and locking are good, as well as their prices. They have created separate models such as distribution services and replication services. They are really good options so that if I want to take that service, I pay for it. If I don't want to, then I don't install it and I don't use it. Modular installation is something that I like about MS SQL Server.

If you have a lot of knowledge about MS SQL Server, you will be able to handle huge amounts of data very efficiently. However, you should make sure that you have regular backup protection. 

The servers which you have to purchase for installing, implementing, or managing MS SQL Server need to be optimized in a better way so that you get optimized performance from MS SQL.

Out of all the tools in the complete SQL Server package, I'm mainly using Toolbox and SQL Profiler because I'm using SSIS packets, so we're using job scheduling a lot. And sometimes we are creating the SSIS packages, so I'm using SQL Server for MSD for maintenance purposes. SQL Server is quite user-friendly. I have experience with Oracle and PostgreSQL, so out of three, I like SQL Server a lot.

They could increase the intelligence of SQL Server. That would be good for us.  There are some good intelligent features in SQL Server. However, they need to increase the intelligence because people switching to SQL Server from other solutions are not so familiar with it. I've been working with SQL Server for the last six years, but people are coming from MySQL or Oracle, so it will take one or two months to adjust. Still, they could add some intelligent tools to convert Oracle into SQL Server something like that. 

And sometimes when I'm writing a function, there is already a predefined structure available. So if they defined their structure more precisely, that would be good for us. And the last thing I would like to add is that SQL Server should handle queries more like Oracle does. For example, you submit a query in Oracle, and the whole table comes up. In SQL Server, you go to the table, right-click, and it lets you see the first 200 rows. Then on top of that, you can add 200 more rows.

So in place of those 200 rows, if I can update all my table records or search my table record without a new search query, it'll be very beneficial. That functionality exists in Oracle, but this feature is not available everywhere in SQL Server. So if SQL Server had the feature, it'd be great because SQL Server is lacking only on this point. For example, one of my clients is a semi-technical person, so I have to train them to file a query in SQL. And they say that Oracle is much better. Say, for example, that I wanted to query a particular employee from a list of all staff. So the query output comes, and they can directly filter out the data by just applying the filter. They don't have to use the drop-down menu and search for all the employees with a given name. 

I've been using SQL Server for the last six years. I'm working with SSIS, SSRS, or MDS. These tools are part of SQL Server, and the back-end queries are developed in SQL Server. 

SQL Server is stable. SQL Server has crashed only two times in six years, but it wasn't a major system error. 

It may be a licensing issue, but sometimes its operating speed becomes slow if we have multiple users. It's lacking some performance, but it's acceptable because we have a heavy load. And I would like to add that we're running SQL Server and SSIS at the same time. So while I've found that SQL Server is quite fast, SSIS is a part of SQL Server. It is just for data testing in India. But if a person knows SSIS, then they usually have very little knowledge about SQL and vice versa.

I know both of them. I found that maybe it's a bad habit, but I'm using SSIS packages. And in the SSIS package, I'm using Toolbox from SQL Server to improve the latency. Implementing both together takes a little time. And one more point is data handling. I am just forwarding the error names, and there are multiple errors in the SQL Server tool, but what if a person comes to work under me and has only one or two years of experience?  Sometimes it might be difficult for them to understand what the errors mean. For example, when joining data, it's easy to implement the inner joint. In the inner joint, there are two columns, so when there's an output error, someone who is inexperienced with SQL Server might not understand. Error messages should be a little more precise and defined, so it's easy to understand.

Setting up an individual SQL Server is pretty straightforward, but when you are implementing multiple tools, it's more complicated. In terms of maintenance, for the DBA part, there are two based in my company because I am on a master device, so they don't allow me to maintain the server part. So one person is from South Korea, and the other is from China. They are handling my SQL Server. So maybe there are multiple teams, but I am contacting these two guys, the DBA. And I'm MDS, so I'm a single person. There are two people on my team, and I have one junior staff member. So I have a three-person team, and there are two DBA sites because I'm discussing my master team. I am deployed on the business side, and there are more than 80 people who are end-users of SQL.

If you're using SQL Server along with SSIS and SSRS tools, it works pretty smoothly and all. When working with Oracle SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc, there are a few problems with the connection.

Overall, SQL Server is good, but sometimes, optimization becomes a little bit tricky when you're using SQL Servers in place of Oracle. For example, while I was implementing two queries one time, the SQL Server gave me the wrong results. This wasn't because of their internal modules. So there may have been some missing data, but SQL Server failed to identify those issues. SQL Server needs to improve there.

For example, say there is a line with a value of 136 or 137. The second value is a space, and the third value is null. And the last one is space. So a space means this is also null. So you are comparing these four values, and if you don't have any idea about data, it's a little problematic. So cases like this, we can deal with such queries using syntax, but if a person has no idea how to deal with this, they'll face an issue.

Here's another example. Say there's a team query that means we are erasing data from the teams, and some people are just analyzing the string. So I see data from it, which means the calling system is there. In the calling system, we receive the data to call anyone, and that type of wire call setup is there. So I am receiving a full-text format from the file I have to upload in the SSIS package. And some cells have a null value. It's a text file, so you can understand there are blanks in some places. I don't know the file type, so I am just trying to dump it into our SQL Server. But when I have time to get to that table, I realize that some values are null, space, and blank. So these four values make problems for me.

I rate SQL Server nine out of 10. I would recommend SQL Server to anyone because you can use cloud-based services, so it's very beneficial. If you install SQL Server on-premise and on the Azure cloud, it is much more advantageous for you. 

Despite the core database is not SQL Server in my working company, SQL Server is widely being used as the backend for many in-house applications and customized applications like Solarwinds.

Helping to effectively and efficiently manage the business-critical data

- There are hundreds of "Dynamic Management Views" (DMVs) & Dynamic Management Functions (DMFs) that are system views & system functions that return metadata of the system state and they provide valuable insight into the current SQL instance state. 

- Resumable online index rebuild 

- Table Partitioning and the Swap out to covert a Table Partition into a separate table.

- Python & R2 Integration, Graph Databases

- Automatic Database Tuning

- Very reliable Backup technology and many more

The price could be better:

Compare to Oracle it is cheaper but with the existence of many open source databases currently in the market, consider reducing the Licensing cost. Secondly, with the Core-based Licensing since SQL 2012 Version, the SQL Licensing price has substantially increased.

Postgres Extensions is a concept in Postgres to extend the Postgres features that are very useful for Performance Monitoring & Optimizations. Similarly option to extend the features as necessary.

I have been using SQL Server for 12 years.

It's been scalable since 2016. With each version, they are adding more features which are very helpful. 

On a rare occasion, I had contacted technical support about five or six years ago and only when I had a specific use case.

The GUI-based step-by-step initial setup is easier for the initial setup and even the Jr.DBAs can handle it with minimal training. The automated installation is possible with PowerShell Scripts and the Infrastructure Provisioning and Configurations tools like Ansible. We managed to automate the SQL installation using Ansible Playbooks and Gitlab to deploy Continous Integration and Continous Deployment.

We implemented this solution by ourselves.

CPU Core-based Licensing & Windows Licensing costs are additional overheads compare to open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Managed SQL Server Database Service in Azure is lagging with many features like Linked Server, DB Mail.

SQL Server deployment in the Cloud does not seem to be cost-effective with respect to the Licensing cost and average Life cycle of 5 years (I reiterate, this is in my opinion). 

If you take Postgre SQL and MySQL, they provide almost all the same features even though they are both open source databases.

I recommend this solution because you can engage in database manipulation, administration and manage almost all your requirements. When compared to Oracle licensing costs, SQL Server is better. 

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