SQL Server Reviews

We use the tool to store and retrieve application data. It allows for storage via multiple threads and separates threads.

I find query optimization to be highly valuable for data management. Additionally, drag-and-drop query creation greatly facilitates data management tasks.

The solution's stability can be improved. 

I can't provide a definitive comment on stability, but I'd lean towards the positive side and rate it around a seven out of ten. I've encountered more efficient and faster databases that deserve a higher rating. Therefore, I'm hesitant to rate SQL Server a nine out of ten for stability.

The number of users depends on the primary master database, which handles the core data. The solution typically serves around two million users interacting with the primary master database. In terms of deployment and maintenance, not much is needed. I'm quite familiar with databases, so that I can handle it myself. Even without guides, setting up and maintaining the system is manageable.

The deployment process was fairly simple, especially with SQL Server and other modern products. The interfaces are easy to understand, and the configuration is straightforward. Typically, you need to configure a node endpoint for the JDBC driver if you're connecting from a client.

Currently, we don't heavily rely on SQL Server for our projects. Most applications are developed for evaluation or quick setup and checking methods. For production-grade deployments, we primarily use PostgreSQL.

The database architecture plays a crucial role in data-heavy applications. I've worked with databases, particularly in telecom, requiring extremely real-time operations like quick authentication and seamless data transfer for calls. These use cases demand quick responsiveness and scalability, especially during high-traffic events like sports matches. Scaling up certain database nodes becomes essential to handle the increased volume of data.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.I haven't personally used the .NET framework, but it seems to be more elaborate compared to Java or Python.

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.

We use the solution for continuous integration, including CI/CD integration.

Support could be improved.

I have been using SQL Server since 1992. I’ve used AWS and Azure for two and three years, respectively.

The stability is fine, especially if you're hosting it on AWS or Azure. You can get up to 99.99% stability on AWS.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

You can scale to any extent. You need to increase your EC2 or your app server.

Six team sites with 50 users each are using this solution.

Sometimes the response time was high.

The initial setup is straightforward. Depending on the complexity, setting up the infrastructure can take a while. You can work on MVP. To deploy on AWS, select SQL Server along with several calls and CPU.

The solution was deployed in-house.

You receive other products, like free usage, depending on the number of product shares.

You can use a Cloudflare or web application layer that controls security. Furthermore, you can implement SQL reverse proxy practices for in-house environments and beyond.

To ensure the security of my SQL server, we typically set up a configuration where an API communicates with the SQL Server, and there's a front-end interface. This setup prevents direct access to the database.

Four people are required for the solution’s maintenance, but it depends on the complexity of the solution. You can put one senior and three trainees.

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

I use SQL Server for my SharePoint environment.

It offers exceptional performance and robust stability, ensuring a highly secure environment.

The most valuable feature of SQL Server is that it is easy to set up.

There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for SQL Server.

I have been working with SQL Server for ten years.

I am working on the most updated version.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

I plan to increase my usage in the future.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It is easy to install.

There is a return on investment. The cost benefits are good.

The cost associated with SQL Servers is on the higher side.

While there are other options available such as Oracle Database, Firebird, and MySQL, we specifically chose SQL Server to fulfill our needs for Microsoft services.

We opted for SQL Server as our scalable server solution to meet the requirements of our Microsoft services.

It's a good solution.

I would rate SQL Server a nine out of ten.

It has all of our data. Our company sells contracts when you buy a car. We sell aftermarket insurance for the tyre, wheel, ding, dent, windshield, etc. When somebody buys a contract, we capture all of that data into a legacy database PostgreSQL, and my task is to incorporate that into our financial platform using T-SQL. So, I write queries, procedures, and views. I use SSIS, and I use SSRS. My job is to get the data into our financial system so that we can process claims, payments, cancellations, and refunds. 

In terms of its version, we're up-to-date. We have version 2019.

This is the heart of the whole company. SQL Server is where all of our financials are. It has all of our data.

I've been using SQL Server for 20 years, and there is nothing that it can't do. It is awesome.

When we are talking about event space architecture, scalability generally comes into play. For example, I might have a hundred thousand transactions a second, and then all of a sudden, I build something that everybody in the world wants. The next thing I know is that I have a million transactions a second. So, to be able to process the throughput, I'd have to scale up, and then when the holidays are over, I'm again down to a hundred thousand transactions, and I want to scale back down. SQL Server is not going to do that. In this way, it is not very scalable. One of the reasons why they want us to use Kafka is so that if we need to, we can do that, but our base program is on SQL Server. So, this is where we would use a Kafka event stack so that if I need more servers, I can just write a command, and I can have more consumers, more brokers, and more producers, and when the holiday season is over, it scales right back down again. SQL Server is not going to do that.

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

We do clustering. If one SQL Server goes down, it automatically goes to another one.

I don't ever need tech support. If it breaks, I can just rebuild it.

They're now using a different database for contracting called Road Runner. I don't know what that is, and how it stores data. I don't know anything about it. 

There is also Postgres. I like SQL Server more than Postgres. That's only because I know SQL Server. I don't know Postgres as well. So, I can't say which one is better because I don't have the same amount of experience in both.

I can bring up a SQL Server in an hour or so and set it up.

In terms of maintenance, the number of people required depends on the need. 
We have a team of DBAs, developers, and UA analysts. We probably have 40 people in our IT area who are maintaining our solution. I'm just the developer. I'm the guy who makes the magic happen, but without other people collecting the information that I need to make the magic happen, I'm stuck. Without the guy who is an expert in permissions, partitioning, and performance tuning, I'm stuck. So, it's definitely a team effort. You can do it all, but you don't want to do it all because then you're running your head off, and you don't really get good at anything. It would be a jack of all trades, master of none type of scenario.

You will seldom find a database that was designed correctly. Just because you got a poor-quality database doesn't mean that you're going to get a better database anywhere else. You rarely get to build a thing on your own. Usually, you inherit somebody else's stuff. So, the challenging thing is working with what you have while trying to implement a better solution. My only advice is to be patient.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. I wouldn't give anything a 10 because I don't have that kind of knowledge, but right now, it does what I need it to do.

We use the solution as the backend for the application.

SQL Server is a backend for software products that our company writes and distributes.

SQL Server is easy to use, but there is a great deal of complexity that you can dive into to use it to its best. Also, it integrates well with other platforms.

SQL Server should make the pricing simpler. It should add simplified load-balancing features.

I have been using SQL Server for 24 years.

There's a reporting database feature in SQL Server, but running multiple instances on the same box would be beneficial. That's one limitation we've encountered. Many of our customers utilize a hosting provider that offers multi-tenant SQL Servers, but we cannot implement a multi-tenant reporting database. 

The solution’s scalability is good.

There are a lot of different deployment options. The default options will work pretty well. We have to change a few things for our setup. Deployment is not at all long. It takes a couple of minutes. It took a long time for the first time because I had to go back and redo it and change the configuration, but it runs pretty smoothly now.

The deployment process follows: mount the ISO and run a script. That script retrieves some entries from a table and creates several instances based on that table using active directory SQL Server accounts, which is an out-of-the-box option. There are a lot of features that you can add to the setup to make it quieter. We've automated it so we can spin up an instance as needed for development processes.

Deployment was done in-house.

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

We use SQL Server for data warehousing or business-intelligent projects. When you leverage the solution with Azure, it's the only database you'll ever need. Oracle is overpriced, but Azure SQL and on-premise SQL are both great products.

The fact that SQL Server fully integrates within the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a plus.

The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on.

I have been using SQL Server for 25 years.

SQL Server is a stable solution.

Compared to other solutions like MongoDB and MySQL, SQL Server is a scalable solution.

The solution’s technical support is okay.

Positive

Oracle is an expensive relational database, and its configuration can be overly complicated. Oracle is less user-friendly. MySQL is not a relational database, but it's a flat-file database. MongoDB is a free tool that allows you to get what you pay for.

The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on. It could be complex, but any database platform will have some complexity.

Historically, SQL Server has been much more affordable than Oracle, which is overpriced.

SQL Server can be used for web applications and Dynamics Business Central. Any Azure app will deploy some element of SQL Server. The solution's security features meet our data protection requirements. SQL Server integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Entra, making it secure. However, since SQL Server is the most popular product, it's also the most popular platform to be hacked.

The solution's data analysis capability, performance monitoring, and error logging are all pretty good. I would recommend SQL Server to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.