SQL Server Reviews

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.

There are many, but I would have to say the two most important for me have been SQL Server Profiler -- to run traces and the ability to kill sessions in the enterprise manager tool. This command-based functionality lets you search and sort through processes actively running on the system to find your i/o hog – that is the user that is overloading the database either through a hung query or bad SQL code.

Once the hog user is found, the terminate or “kill” command can be used to shut down the hanging transaction. Similar to how clearing a vehicle crash on the interstate frees up waiting traffic, this kill command gives other users the ability to continue work as normal once the terminated transaction has been killed. This should be used sparingly though since it can cause waiting applications to corrupt data depending on how the application was written, but it is an often used research feature when a system starts to overload or show major signs of slowing.

In an effort to forego a data warehouse purchase, one company I worked with used a second SQL Server instance loaded to separate hardware as a reporting environment avoiding the need to hire additional employees to support a data warehouse. Essentially, the production database was snapshot and copied nightly to the reporting instance where it was restored through automated processes.

All employees who wrote queries and reports against the reporting instance utilized the same knowledge, skillset and tools already used in the OLTP production environment. While it didn’t have all the abilities of a true data warehouse, it was quickly implemented and well served for the desired purpose.

Multiple operating systems support should improve. The ongoing and newly marketed support for Linux and Unix environments running SQL Server is a big win for Microsoft, in my opinion.

Previous hold back related to open source environments stemmed from admins or management who would not run SQL Server for various reasons which many times boiled down to not liking Microsoft as a company.

Open source and Microsoft have conflicted in the open source world for years, but I think Microsoft is finally starting to turn that tide in an effort to compete with other vendors.

20 years. I began as a Microsoft Access database programmer in 1998 connecting early dynamic intranet websites to Access backend databases.

I later progressed to the SQL Server 2000 environment and have utilized SQL Server ever since then.

Issues encountered with stability were always correctable assuming we as a business were willing to spend money. The two major issues that come to mind were slowing of image files loading to disk using SQL Server and lack of proper indexing.

Images were archived for a 30 year legal period at a rate of at least 12 million per year and we eventually just hit a max depth of data where SQL Server had a hard time returning results. Shortening the physical file path structure of how deep SQL Server had to dig through the hard drive in addition to changing to new and improved disk technologies resolved the problem.

After this drive change occurred, a separate problem started where our database came to a crawl which is when we realized our regularly scheduled database index had not been updated to accommodate the new structure changes. A new index was put in place which is when SQL Server started humming along better than ever.

Microsoft makes life easy to expand your environment through clustering tools and after-hours operational scheduling features. SQL Server is easily suited for small businesses where it found huge popularity, but daily operations can sometimes be overlooked as the business grows causing intermittent operational kinks. I have seen a few small businesses determine that a slowing or overloaded SQL Server environment means they should look at more enterprise level databases, which is simply not the case.

Just like a Windows PC needs basic defragmentation maintenance to run effectively, SQL Server needs its own regular maintenance. There are many options available to improve the performance of SQL Server including the simple add-on clustering features which will balance excess load on the server.

In addition, database indexes need to either be created or re-indexed periodically. A database does not automatically know how an application was designed although it’s very good at trying to guess using built-in scheme mapping software. Creating indexes and related maintenance schedules specific to your environment can make a huge difference in how quickly SQL Server responds to data requests.

Disk partitions are another method for improvement. No matter how well SQL Server software is configured, it is limited by the hardware level. Underlying disk usage grows as data grows meaning the more data you add to the database results in the longer it will take for the database to find data on-disk. That’s when it’s time to either spread data across many independent disk sets or move to more expensive flash drives which save time by avoiding read & write disk operations.

These options, of course, require time, effort, and money, but they have been well worth the costs of doing business based on my experience.

I have only had to call Microsoft support 5 times in my nearly 20-year career, but they were extremely helpful. The one frustrating experience was 10 years ago when I worked over the phone 8 hours straight with 3 separate techs from the India location. Keep in mind, these were days pre-remote support meaning I had to verbally translate every diagnostic error I was seeing on the screen and assume the tech was clear on the meaning. The techs I worked with were extremely nice and tried hard to help, but I reached my frustration level due to the verbal language barrier.

The senior tech, who I spent the most time working with, had an extremely thick accent and was hard to understand. I could tell he had hit a dead-end on his knowledge of the product so I finally asked to be transferred to a specialist in America. Once I found the right person in the US, my problem was resolved within an hour.

In hindsight, I knew the senior tech was lost at the 6-hour mark, so I should have spoken up then, but he never complained and kept trying different solutions, which is good on Microsoft’s part.

My team and I have tried many different technologies including MySQL (cheap but effective), Oracle (expensive and effective), PostgreSQL, and DB2. I never jumped on the PostgreSQL or DB2 train, but could not give you a specific reason why due to my limited knowledge of the products. It usually came down to lack of knowledge for available programmers in our area, meaning we would have to train new hires and take a lot of time getting them familiar with a new database structure. That defaulted us to either Oracle or SQL Server since MySQL was not used in production at the time due to limitations surrounding support.

Oracle owns MySQL these days and they, of course, would prefer you run full fledged Oracle database for support needs. Oracle’s supremely expensive licensing has normally pushed me and coworkers to Microsoft SQL Server although every organization I have worked with pays for some form of Oracle even though SQL Server is primarily touching end users.

I personally feel Oracle is a great database but also think Microsoft SQL Server can be configured to run just as well as Oracle in most cases. The problem I normally find is that many bloated applications run SQL Server where more streamlined (and many times less functional) applications run Oracle. For that reason primarily, Oracle has had a better reputation in the pre-Amazon world.

This could all change in the years to come as Microsoft starts to fight Amazon and Google in cloud processing.

Creating a SQL Server instance using the pre-installed GUI setup screen available in either Visual Studio or Enterprise Manager can be very simple to create and maintain database “instances” making it a prime choice for small startup businesses.

In addition, Microsoft has added loads of training videos on their website along with step-by-step instructions for creating and maintaining servers. The user can get as complex as desired in SQL Server by learning all the behind-the-scenes commands the GUI is using. You will start researching commands quickly once the first SQL Server error occurs and the GUI doesn’t know how to resolve it.

For the most part, what you see is what you get with Microsoft’s licensing website. I sat through many hours of negotiations with many database and application vendors. Some application vendors try negotiating a better deal based on their licensed volume, but only twice have I seen Microsoft cater to lower licensing and it was because they wanted to make long-term wins with the customer knowing they had the possibility of gaining market share.

That said, Microsoft is still usually cheaper than Oracle who will sometimes look cheaper to start with but add the possibility of higher long term rates. Asking for a discount can never hurt.

MySQL (now owned by Oracle) is sometimes used internally for dynamic website needs, but Oracle is the only competitor evaluated for SQL Server.

Start in the cloud if feasibly possible and if it makes sense for your business. I have mostly worked with organizations that still don’t trust the cloud for security and legal reasons, but Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are releasing promising products in the cloud that are leaps and bounds ahead of processing power for local servers assuming your organization is willing to pay what it takes. I have priced cloud services enough to know they’re expensive, but they could replace a lot of unknowns for growing businesses or those starting from scratch; mainly network security, redundancy and technical skillset of employees.

Cloud services have full-time employees focusing on those niches meaning you as an employer will have less headaches at night.

According to CNBC and Synergy Research Group as of this writing, Amazon AWS leads 33% of global cloud market share. That may sound like a small number, but it’s by far the majority of customers since Amazon’s AWS cloud revenue is more than the next five providers combined. Two of those 5 providers are Microsoft and Google.

And for those of you new to the cloud, you do have the ability to run Microsoft products, including Microsoft SQL Server, in the AWS cloud.

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.

I use the solution in my company to take care of the database management area.

The solution should provide users with features to automate some of the daily routines for which there are different tools available. SQL Server should serve as an out-of-the-box tool for database maintenance.

Maintenance of the solution is an area of concern, and improvements can be helpful. The solution should offer an out-of-the-box tool with automatic maintenance procedures, which could make it easier for less experienced people to set up the product easily.

I have been using SQL Server for twenty five years. My company is a system integrator and a Microsoft partner.

It is an extremely stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I deal with small, medium, and large-sized customers who use the tool.

It takes a lot of time for users to reach out to the right technical experts who can resolve their issues. Users are redirected to go through the medium-level support, who fail to resolve their issues. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have limited experience with MySQL. I like SQL Server more than MySQL. Compared to SQL Server, MySQL requires more technical expertise in order to deal with some easy tasks.

The product's initial setup phase is easy.

The solution can be deployed in ten to fifteen minutes.

The product is offered at a very high price, specifically for the enterprise segment, making it very difficult for our company to sell the product to our customers. In the enterprise segment, the tool has quite a bit of experience. For normal cases, the prices are okay.

For development purposes, the tool is free. For medium-sized customers who don't need some enterprise features, the tool would be available for 200 USD per month. For the enterprise segment, the tool's cost can go up to 6,000 USD.

I have limited experience with scaling SQL Server for large datasets.

Speaking about the most beneficial for our company's data analysis needs, I don't know the huge range of services offered by Microsoft, like reporting or integration services, which make it easy for the users to deal with database manipulation, integrations, and reporting. The aforementioned services offered by Microsoft are quite user-friendly.

The tool covers almost all of the security features for data protection with a variety of access protocols, and the database encryption part covers all the cases in my company.

The solution is easy to maintain if you know what exactly you need to do.

The people required for maintenance depend on the scale at which the product is used in an environment, but under normal circumstances, one person is required to take care of the maintenance process.

My company uses the tool for a variety of integrations, especially with the old legacy systems, which can easily be adapted to SQL Server. With modern architectures and web services, it is also possible to integrate SQL Server with any product in the market currently.

Before buying the product, users should check and remember all the licensing parts of the tool since it can be very complex. Users should check very thoroughly for the use case and exactly what prices they need to pay to use it.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

SQL Server is very useful in managing databases for various applications. It is easy to use, making it accessible even for those with limited skills. SQL is a preferred choice for handling limited data. Additionally, Microsoft provides excellent support for SQL Server.

We are using in-house ERP. Currently, we are using SQL for different projects, like surveys and documentation. The data are stored in SQL, which is our main database.

SQL Server is very easy to use. A person with limited skill also can handle the software easily. The retrieving time of the data is very fast. You don't require any higher configuration machine for that. If you have very limited resources, you can easily manage.

There is a limitation in the SQL. There are around 4GB restrictions, which Microsoft needs to work on.

If your data volume is higher, your server performance may suffer. Microsoft needs to focus on improving stability in such scenarios.

If the dataset is limited, the performance is good. If it involves bulk data, then the speed is slow.

The number of users impacts the solution’s scalability.

100-500 users are using this solution.

Customer support is fast and knowledgeable. Whenever we raise the ticket, they reply within two hours.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is not lengthy. It's a simple flow chart. There is no complexity in the application. It will take half an hour to deploy if you have the right hardware resources.

The first step is gathering the developers’ prerequisites, which depend on the application. We consider the projected data volume for the last ten years, which informs our capacity planning. Based on that, we recommend virtualization.

We have two kinds of licenses for SQL Server: perpetual and subscription-based. We already have the perpetual license. The subscription-based license is renewed every year. The perpetual license was obtained previously, while the subscription-based license is a newer solution we've deployed. We have both perpetual and subscription-based licenses. Perpetual license lacks support.

SQL Server is very secure in terms of login and data protection. Security largely depends on the programmer’s implementation. When data is inputted, it is encrypted to prevent unauthorized access. So, laypeople cannot understand the content of the data.

If your organization needs secure data management or is considering migrating your systems to a virtualization platform, I strongly recommend utilizing Microsoft products. They are user-friendly and require no specialized skill level.

Microsoft has developed the software to be used for any major and smaller applications. Therefore, its integration is very good in terms of the specifications provided.

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

Our correlation and relational databases are on Microsoft SQL Server.

The company uses two platforms: MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Some applications are on MySQL, and some applications are SQL Server. 

I have pretty much worked all my life in Microsoft SQL Server.

I am in the process of creating a data strategy to consolidate multiple siloed data centers. Once my plan is finalized and approved, then we are going to execute it on the Microsoft platform.

• Performance-wise, it is an excellent tool.
• It is a Microsoft product, so there's a lot of support. 
• It's not a new tool; it has been around for a while. 
• It is one of the top five relational databases in the market. 
• It is very user-friendly.
• There are a lot of resources available for it.

I would like to see native plugins built for other platforms versus having to buy third-party plugins to tap into S3 buckets and AWS Cloud. Right now, it does not have those built-in plugins.

I know that they are building SQL Server for the Unix environment, which is in the beta version, and not out yet. This has been a long time wish for a lot of people. Once that is out, we'll be able to tell how diversified they have become in regards to other platforms.

It hasn't 100 percent on scalability and third-party plugins.

It is one of the most stable relational databases out there.

With the new versions and Azure, which is in the cloud, these do accommodate scalability. Until the 2014 version, the scalability wasn't there, but from the 2016 version and above, I think they have taken all these scalability features into consideration.

I have not used technical support for Microsoft with my current company. I have used them in the past. It depends on the tier of support that was purchased by the company as to the level of support that you receive.

Our company has probably been using this solution since it was released.

It is expensive, but you get what you pay for.

Since we are a cloud-based company, there is AWS pricing on top of the SQL Server pricing. The Enterprise Edition can typically sell from around $1000 dollars a month, which is not cheap. Then, there is an additional one-time Windows cost, based on the code, which can go anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000 for the license.

From my perspective, the two vendors for this are Microsoft and Amazon (AWS).

They are working on making it better with every release, compared to Oracle Db2 and IBM.

I would definitely recommend SQL Server. It's not cheaper any more, like it used to be, but if you can afford it, then it's the best.

When I select a vendor, from a tool perspective, I make sure that they have full support available, have been in the market for awhile, and the solution/application is stable.

From an open source perspective, like MySQL, Aurora, and MongoDB, they have done a great job in making a robust database container.

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 many applications between Microsoft and SQL. Most are in the legacy direction, but some are more modern databases with those application requirements. We have used it for multi-purposes such as back-office products applications and cloud office environments.

The solution is easy to use, has rich feature sets, and is business-oriented. 

They could improve the solution by allowing more portability between on-premise and the cloud.

More improvements can be brought around hyper-threading. Like we see in work engines of hyper-threading. It is very complex in terms of the way they do it. If it was via CPU or something else, it would be much easier.

In a future release, they could improve by expanding their form base capabilities.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

I have found the solution to be very stable.

The solution is scalable.

The support is good for the solution.

We used Oracle and DB2 in the past.

Initially, the installation took a while. We have started deploying configurations that are now standardized. We have automated it, but it can still be problematic. For the most part, the installation is now quite easy. Additionally, The way they have many configurable parameters that influence performance is in a way problematic.

We did the deployment of the solution and we have a team of 15 people doing the deployment and maintenance.

The licenses are really expensive. Their licensing model should be more simplistic.

I would recommend this solution to others and we plan to keep using it in the future.

I rate SQL Server a nine out of ten.