We performed a comparison between MYSQL and SQL Server based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: SQL Server comes out ahead in this comparison because it is less demanding on resources and can more easily be integrated with other solutions. Some users feel that MySQL requires more maintenance and can be a bit buggy and less stable than SQL Server.
"The product is flexible and easy to use."
"It is very easy to install and has all basic database features."
"Table partitioning is most valuable. It is easy to use."
"The most valuable features are that it's free and the documentation is good."
"It is free, which is probably its most valuable feature. It is a pretty full-featured relational database. It really does everything we need it to do."
"One of the best features is this solution is easy to use."
"MySQL is easy to integrate. It works with just about every language."
"The solution is great for small applications in particular."
"For me, the initial setup is very easy as I have years of experience with the product."
"It is easy to use and easy to perform a backup."
"It is the latest technology and pretty powerful in terms of the high availability of the virtual server."
"The ease of administration, in general, is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"From a security perspective, we have no complaints."
"We have found the solution to be scalable."
"Microsoft is less demanding because everything is GUI, unlike Oracle, where you need to use command lines."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is that it's integrated with the Visual Studio and also with Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. It's a tool they have and it's quite easy to use and understand. It's the interface for programming for SQL Services."
"The user interface could be more user friendly. Mainly because most of the times we see black and white digital lines. Something like Python."
"The GUI interface probably can be improved. Let us say I want to see the relationships in the database. In the query analyzer, I would like to go and drop the tables and create relationships between the tables. I haven't found a feature like that in MySQL. It was a shortcoming even in SQL Server. MySQL can have more performance monitoring tools. I know Google has these tools, but within MySQL, there are not that many tools to monitor things like performance and database locking. They might be in there, and I might not be familiar enough to know where they are. I am a pretty new user of MySQL."
"We require more ease of use, scalability, and high availability. These are some of the critical features that we use and look for in a product. It should be easier to manage clusters. Scalability is very important for us because our projects and concurrency requirements are quite big. We also require high availability of the server, application, and other things. It should also have more performance-based features or enhancements from the performance point of view. When we divide a database, it should be able to handle the queries very fast."
"The availability of tools could be improved in the MySQL open-source platform. They can provide more analytical tools. I haven't had any particularly difficult issues to troubleshoot on MySQL, but in the past, on Microsoft SQL Server, I had to troubleshoot some difficult issues, and better tools were in place to see what was going on in real-time on the server. So, that's the bit that is lacking on the MySQL open-source platform."
"I would like to see more integrations of the solution with other platforms and improve the support on different data types."
"Integration is a key feature in need of improvement."
"MySQL could be improved by adding more automation."
"When working with a cluster wide, I have to use the MySQL cluster version."
"I do not think SQL Server is suited for a typical database warehouse environment. However, people do use SQL Server for data warehouse environments but the best use case is for very small databases. If somebody wants to store more than 10 TB of data querying then the performance really degrades. The performance should be improved in the future to allow more scalability."
"Occasionally the performance, as good as it is, is a bit off. We sometimes experience memory spiking. If they could maybe fix that aspect of the solution, that would be quite helpful for our organization."
"I would like to have more replication scenarios."
"The solution could be better when it comes to security."
"It will be very useful to have high-level database monitoring. It should also have built-in business intelligence reporting."
"More things in SQL Server need to be automated."
"There should be more tools and documentation for tuning the performance of Microsoft SQL Server. It would be nice to have more tools for tuning because currently, all the tuning that we have to do with our databases is almost manual. We have to read a bunch of knowledge base articles, and this information should be better documented. Its free text search should also be improved. It is quite important for us. Currently, we're developing our own free text search because of the lacking flexibility in Microsoft SQL Server. Therefore, we're kind of using elastic search and making different implementations in order to reach our targets. Using just the native free text search of Microsoft SQL Server is not enough for us. It should have more flexible features as compared to the current version."
"Performance could be improved."
MySQL is ranked 4th in Relational Databases Tools with 142 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. MySQL is rated 8.2, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of MySQL writes "Good beginner base but it should have better support for backups". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". MySQL is most compared with Firebird SQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Teradata and Oracle Database, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and Vertica. See our MySQL vs. SQL Server report.
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