SQL Server Reviews

We are using this solution as a database. The main purpose is as an SQL Server.

Our backend and core systems are using Microsoft SQL Server. We have no complaints from anyone who is using it.

We have nothing that we can compare it with.

It's much more friendly in comparison with Oracle.

We are using the standard features. I don't see any areas that can be simplified with the standard functionalities. We don't use any special extended features.

From my point of view, using SQL Server 2017 and 2019 is very good. I haven't experienced any issues or been in a situation where I was struggling with problems for which I didn't have access to proper documentation or proper functions.

I have been using SQL Server for eight years.

After eight years in our company, we have not had any issues with SQL Server from a stability point of view.

We are a small company. We don't have any issues with this and we are fully virtualized. If we need to, we can extend the amount of CPUs as we want.

Our core system is being used by 50 users, but they are not accessing the SQL Server. We have approximately 10 users in our company who are using the SQL Server.

I have never used technical support.

I am using Avamar and Data Domain. I have been using Data Domain for four or five years. It was used as the data storage for the backup solution in our sister company.

I worked with Oracle in the previous company. Microsoft SQL Server is better.

We have also used Software Center, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, and almost everything that is Microsoft-based.

It was installed by an outsourcing company. It is another sister company.

It's cheaper than Oracle.

I am fine with the pricing, but pricing is an area that can always be improved.

We are Microsoft D-level partners. Pricing is not an issue for us, because of the outreach of our mother company.

We are a Microsoft-based company.

I would rate SQL Server a seven out of ten.

Database Engine

Integration Services

Reporting Services

I am a Senior Software Engineer. I've used SQL Server for most of the solutions that I worked with, from web crawlers to logistic platforms and medical devices.

• The Server Objects area of SQL Server Management Studio
• The SQL Server Configuration Manager

Over 10 years.

Yes, I encountered issues only when using the Express editions during the development. SQL Server, generally speaking, is stable also in high transaction environments.

Yes, I encountered issues in the CPU intensive application, like web crawlers. It was difficult to reach the desired scalability through the fine tuning options available.

The support is good. The knowledge base is very good.

I have experience with Sybase SQL Anywhere .

I switched mainly because the SQL Server is widely deployed and known, for better XML support, and for better integration with .NET framework and its related technologies.

It was straightforward for most of the installation, thanks to the wizards.

I am not a direct purchaser, so I don’t know.

SAP/Sybase SQL Anywhere for the small footprint which makes it suitable for embedded solutions.

SAP/Sybase SQL Anywhere for the built-in synchronization technologies available.

Improve the built-in database replication technologies.

We are using it for various applications.

It is easy to deploy and easy to maintain.

They need to improve their support. It should be faster.

I have been using it for a couple of years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have more than a thousand users who use this solution. It is being used heavily, and we don't have any plans to increase its usage.

Their support needs improvement. It should be faster.

We didn't use any other solution previously. We have been using it for a long time.

It was easy.

I can install it myself. We also have a technical team of three admins.

Its licensing is yearly. There are no additional costs. There is only the subscription license.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We use this solution as our database.

It could be more stable.

I have been using SQL Server for four or five years.

SQL Server is a stable solution, but it could be improved.

Similar to Microsoft SQL, it is easy to scale.

We have a team of 300 people who are using this solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

Previously, I used MySQL.

I was not involved in the installation.

We have an IT team to complete the installation.

There is no licensing cost for SQL Server.

I am a user of this solution but I don't know that I understand it well enough to recommend it to others because I did not install it.

I would rate SQL Server a five out of ten.

I am an IT professional, I write services for my clients. I provide support services for SQL, firewalls, and operating systems. IT infrastructure support in general is what I provide.

What I like most is the management, as it is very easy compared with other products.

Security is an issue. This is an area that needs to be improved.

There is security built-in, but most of the developers don't emphasize the security enough. When they are building the products or databases, they don't focus on the security of the database.

I have been providing services for this solution to my clients for five or six years.

We have had no issues with stability. It's one of the most stable products.

This solution is scalable. It is easy to expand.

In the five or six years that I have been handling SQL Servers, I have not had to contact technical support. 

Their documentation is sufficient for troubleshooting and maintenance activity.

I am also using Sophos.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have our in-house team of more than 10 engineers for maintenance.

Pricing is a bit on the higher side. It could be reduced.

To others who are interested in using this solution, I would say go for it. It's a stable database that is easy to configure and maintain. I would suggest this solution when compared with other databases.

I would rate SQL Server an eight out of ten.

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.

This is a departmental database engine which supports primarily localized solutions, data capture, and retrieval. However, with the exception of our aviation group, it is used for localized data lake or reporting solutions support.

It is cost effective with easy integration into the core MS Office tools. Hence user adoption is easy. Also, being a commodity product there is an abundance of cheap resources having experience with the toolkit, but very few senior or truly expert support personnel are available. Again because it is viewed as a commodity product even by developers, no serious time is spent on skills development with this toolkit.

Traditional DB toolkit closely integrated into Microsoft Office. This makes it truly easy to deploy in a light non-business critical environment.

• It does not scale up to a truly global environment. We operate in 220+ countries and territories with data services centralized in three data centers. The ability for MS SQL to operate in this environment is a challenge for anything spanning regions or having a global footprint. 
• It is best suited to supporting a single functional instance by business domain or a single country. 
• MS needs to work better at the WAN implementations transoceanic. 
• It also needs to have a less closed or less MS centric tool dependency as integration with other databases and non-MS development environments is always problematic.

Initially as a post-transactional database, but now it's mainly a transactional database and for Analysis Services.

It's a very capable, efficient, price-performant OLAP server on which we can build our solutions.

Analysis Services, because we are an independent software vendor in the business-intelligence area.

The web interface and the command line interface could be better so we could manage and build some things around an API. If we could build our own solution, our own interface, and then manage the solution through that open API, that would be better.

With the new, big releases, there's quite a lot of work that we have to do. From 2005 to 2008, and then from 2012 to 2016. But, otherwise, it's quite stable. It's nice.

Even for us, it's quite okay. For the type of customers we have now, it's okay. But, for a big amount of data, when we are speaking about IoT Segments, and Big Data projects, there are performance issues.

If there wasn't Stack Overflow, that would be a problem. But luckily there are also other resources on the web which we can use to help ourselves. Just depending on Microsoft support it would not be so great.

We used PostgreSQL, and we also used some other OLAP servers.

It's more and more complex. The 2005 version was very nice and neat, but now it's more and more complicated.

The price has been going higher and higher. The market is quite price sensitive.

At that time there was also Sybase, Oracle, MySQL. That's at the time those databases were up.

It's good if you need OLAP services.

I give it a seven out of 10 overall, because of the things mentioned: First is that during the version upgrades, sometimes things are complicated. The second thing is the support is not so... without an open-source community it would not be so good. Third is the pricing, because it's changing, sometimes it's confusing.