SQL Server Reviews

We use SQL Server to host our ERP system. It serves both as the underlying database and server application software. This database solution handles all our ERP calls.

We use SQL Server to support Business Intelligence. It also connects with Power BI. We create all our views and datasets in SQL, specifically for Power BI. Previously, we used Tableau but transitioned to Power BI for all our analytics needs.

SQL Server provides access to audio information and audio tables. You can customize and create views. The ability to customize and upload these services is uncertain when migrating, but SQL in a local environment or Azure seems suitable for now. The ability to see tables, reviews, and custom script options is good.

The upgrades are unstable.

I have been using SQL Server for several years.

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

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The support is pretty good. We have never had to reach out to Microsoft for issues. It is a pretty solid application.

The initial setup is straightforward. You need to install technical agents and create databases.

We use Active Directory authentication. If you have access to the database, it's secure. Not everyone with access to the database can access it. Only our IT staff or those who require access have permission. It does offer a high level of control and security.

We have a small team. We could explore Azure Virtual Desktop or engage with local partners if we need additional technical knowledge. We employ a cloud gateway, enabling our SQL database to be somewhat cloud-based. This facilitates integration with various cloud applications, such as the Power Platform. We use Power Apps and Power Automate, allowing us to connect to our database in adaptable and scalable ways.

I recommend the solution if it meets your requirements.

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

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.

In my role as faculty, I would use it to facilitate having a database with all the teachers needed that are equivalent to Oracle as a database for a small scale project.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is that the metadata is just generalized. Metadata is the way that data is described both for technical aspects of building a database and for the user interfaces. Our metadata is the objects attached to the database, not in the software. 

It helps with moving the design of the database into reality.

The server itself doesn't need much improvement. 

The product overall would benefit from the addition of better tutorials to help master the skills necessary to actually build a project database. Right now, what is available isn't sufficient.

Overall, I would suggest a nice tight integration with the toolset now known as Power BI. It might not even be missing, however, I'm planning to concentrate a lot of my time with the tutorials and I have Power BI loaded onto my HP laptop. bA brilliant student did it for me when she demoed it in a class. I'm going to use that copy of it and have many tutorials to get ready. 

I have enough experience to support students and grad students who use it as a database backend to accomplish their projects.

I have to qualify my experience with "using" the solution. I have done not very much on my own individually or for a client using SQL Server. I have been supportive in the role of facilitator for students to succeed with it and to be observant of how it is very similar in conceptual important ways to my very deep experience with Oracle as the database backend.

That said, I've been familiar with the solution for about ten years now.

What I don't know yet is if it would be stable when being migrated from the scale of a project that would be in a prototype on a small machine, into a much larger environment in order to get ready to go to production. I'm not sure of that experience, whether it's vulnerable or not. I haven't tried it.

However, in my experience, so far, the solution is quite stable. In terms of stability, with Microsoft being so supportive of its success, and so many smart professionals who have the skillsets to use it, that it would be stable. I'm confident about that. It's not a new tool, so stable being defined as it doesn't break down.

In terms of scalability, with the right people supporting it, who have the skills to do so, it would scale up. It's likely to be true in the context of the overall tool called Power BI that Microsoft has released, and which has high credibility among Gardner Group and others about it being available for business intelligence.

The solution isn't used often or widely per se. Not many people, if any, use it regularly due to the fact that an instance of SQL Server is set up only to accomplish a project relevant to a course that needs to have a database. After that, it doesn't stick around. It doesn't last longer than that.

Previous to my position at the university, I worked both as an employee and a consultant and was very much involved with Oracle as a database for years, going back to 1997 and until about 2010.

The initial setup isn't complex. It's certainly straightforward. The downloads and the installs don't all fall apart. It succeeds. The constraint is in the context of the students enabling a SQL Server to run on a laptop. That's a constraint rather than on an actual problem with the hardware server itself. 

Deployment takes, on average, about four hours. After that, you have a somewhat bare-bones server with the capability of running SQL datum to create the data itself or to import it from another database.

Since the solution is only really used for training purposes for classes and isn't meant to exist permanently, there's no one who needs to really maintain it.

I don't recall any help from people in the university who had the knowledge to support a student who was doing it for the course I was teaching. Sometimes these students have plenty of experience in their own professional job and they bring it to class to help succeed with the effort.

I, unfortunately, do not handle licensing, so I don't know what the costs are for the product.

MySQL as a database is sufficient for the scale of the projects that I've been talking about for ht purposes we have currently. PostgreSQL, which I do not personally know very well, is something else we looked at. It's a matter of the scale, generally. When I'm teaching, I'm probably the only member of faculty teaching actual database design in our school of engineering. We only would work on something that I call prototyping. Nothing that would reach for the responsibility of becoming our actual production database. 

In August of last summer, we updated to the latest version of the solution. At least, at that time, it was the latest version.

What the school does in its academics is make a minimum training available for students who want to use it. They can learn how.

Now we're all online. I do not know if the University has SQL Server as the backend for any of its regular production databases. I think it only is a database for students to choose when they need one for a project.

I don't think it has extensive utilization. And in the teaching involved for online learning, I would probably express very lightweight recommendations to try it because we're not on campus. We cannot connect to a real server for a backend in order to do the install on onsite. This is just a COVID-19 in constraint.

If a company is considering utilizing this tool in the future, I would advise that they have someone on staff or in a consulting agreement who really knows the tool, and has succeeded with it.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's the right tool for production-ready or enabled databases. It's now equivalent to Oracle.

In my data warehousing project, I use SQL Server alongside Power BI. SQL Server serves as the data storage solution, while Power BI is used for data visualization.

The most valuable features for database management in SQL Server are SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio Code with its administration capabilities.

Improvement in SQL Server should focus on lowering the high cost, especially for environments requiring extensive CPU and memory usage like data warehousing. While existing features are great, affordability is a significant concern, particularly for enterprise licenses. Additionally, enhancements in managing availability groups and clustering could be beneficial.

I have been working with SQL Server for 20 years.

I would rate the stability of the solution as a nine out of ten.

SQL Server is highly scalable, but the scalability comes with a price tag. Additionally, for on-premise deployments, hardware purchase is necessary, which can be a limiting factor. I would rate the scalability of the solution as an eight out of ten. We have approximately 500 users at our company.

My experience with SQL Server's customer support has been positive in the past, but recently, I have noticed a decline in responsiveness, and now I would rate them as an eight out of ten instead of a perfect ten. While I used to receive prompt answers to my inquiries, I have had a question pending for several weeks now without a resolution. It seems that Microsoft's focus on Azure may be impacting their support for on-premise solutions like SQL Server.

Positive

The initial setup of SQL Server is straightforward and user-friendly and I would rate it at around an eight out of ten for ease of use. While the basic setup is simple, additional considerations for security may require some tweaking. 

Deploying a SQL Server for testing purposes typically takes around ten minutes, while for production, it can take an entire day due to the additional tweaking required for optimal performance and security.

SQL Server is generally more expensive than other solutions. I would rate the price of the enterprise version of SQL Server as a ten out of ten for being very expensive compared to the standard version. The enterprise version costs approximately 20 times more than the standard version.

We use SQL Server Availability Groups for high availability. It supports our requirements well and is preferred over cluster solutions for its effectiveness.

SQL Server offers advanced security features like data masking, which allows users to restrict access to specific columns, enhancing data privacy and control. This capability is particularly useful for protecting sensitive information from even database administrators.

SQL Server is the primary technology we use, tightly integrated with our existing IT infrastructure and applications. We rely on Microsoft products for seamless compatibility and avoid unnecessary complexity by sticking to a single vendor ecosystem.

My recommendation for using SQL Server is that it is a stable and versatile option with a lot of capabilities. However, there are cheaper alternatives available on the internet that offer similar performance. It is essential to consider whether the cost difference justifies the added performance of SQL Server, especially when cheaper options can achieve comparable results with slightly slower hardware.

Overall, I would rate SQL Server as an eight out of ten.

We are consultants and users of this solution and we deploy both on cloud and on-prem. The primary use case of this solution is for its Health Check feature. I'm the company owner and CIO.

We assist companies to improve the performance of their servers. We're generally able to improve performance by 40%. 

I like the Always On tool which improves the SQL server availability. We cross-link servers with Oracle, MySQL and other platforms using PolyBase as a service to join with big data systems like Spark.

I think the treatment of database storage could be improved. There is also an intermediate locked file that prevents users from inserting or writing something in the database that slows things down. I'd like to see the Perform Volume Maintenance Task made available for locked files. It would mean that the SQL server can directly grow files. Without it, you have to go to the local system account, which can disrupt users. It's connected to the local security policy. 

I've been using this solution for 20 years. 

This solution has fantastic stability. 

The scalability is great, and you can use several servers concurrently without using duplication services. Our company is small but we manage around 30,000 users. We have 10 people involved in maintenance and deployment. 

We are part of the Microsoft team in Spain and sometimes we have to call support with a specific question but not very often. In the past 12 months I've only made contact a couple of times. 

I previously used Informix DB because Linux was not the best tool for enterprise when I began working in the industry. Microsoft was working on new technologies and when they came out with SQL I switched to it. I've had the certification on SQL for several years already. 

The initial setup is relatively easy but it depends on the situation, and sometimes requires some planning. You can configure SQL after you've deployed on cloud. Implementation can take some time because it's not just the installation of the SQL server which can be done in less than an hour. The implementation of the database systems can take several days or weeks depending on the organization. Our consultants have more than 12 years of experience working as DBAs, so we carry out the installation. 

In a standard package, you need to buy two core packs. If you need four core packs the price is around € 8,000. There are more options in the cloud where fees are around € 60 a month. The cost is scaled and if you're deploying in the cloud you need to buy a machine infrastructure as a service. We only sell the license across the cross solution provider (CSP) program. If you have less than 25 users, you can buy an SQL standard per server license where the cost is around €1,200 approximately.

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

We use the solution to provide the database layer for multiple applications.

We have been using this solution for 10+ years.

I have had issues with SQL Server but Microsoft support has been able to resolve them quickly and most came down to configuration/design errors and not a stability of the product issue.

SQL Server is quick to install < an hour.  Additional features increase the installation time.

The SQL Server pricing model is based on CPU cores that your database server utilises.

To others looking into using a SQL Server, I would say that it goes down to the application that you are developing and what funds you have available to run the total system.

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 on FastAutomate, our core product, to store the aggregated data from different nodes. It resides on the server that's handling the agents. We also use it for different organizations for development. Therefore, we use it for development mainly.

Overall, we've been satisfied with the capabilities of the product.

The solution is stable. It works without issue - to the point you rarely need any technical support at all.

The scalability is very good.

It's got an easy initial setup.

The remote access aspect needs to be improved in terms of security. Right now, it's a little bit hard. 

Also, they need to work on the user interface, as it's a little bit old. They need to improve it a little bit. 

The pricing could be lowered a bit.

We've used the solution for a while. 

Its stability has been good. The solution performs well and is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We have found the solution to be scalable. If a company needs to expand, it can do so. 

Techni al support is good. That said, it's hard to judge as you don't need support on SQL Server. It's working without trouble or issues. Therefore, it's rare to seek support for SQL Server. You rarely have to deal with them.

I've also used SQL Azure.

The recommendation is based on the use case. It depends on what use case the customer will need. If they don't have the capacity to manage their own Server, I would recommend Azure, as it's managed. Therefore, you don't have to worry about the management and administration.

The main difference between the two is, in some data types it is not available on SQL Azure while it's available on SQL Server or vice versa. There's a version of SQL Server with a little bit of limited functionality. That said, the difference is not huge. You can go back and forth between them if you want.

The initial setup is very easy. It's even easier than before, in fact. A company shouldn't have any problems with the implementation. 

The price could be less.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. If the price was a bit less or the remote access was better, I would rate it tighter.

In general, I've been happy with the product.