We compared SQL Server and Amazon Aurora based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, SQL Server is praised for its robustness, reliability, security, and user-friendly interface, with reasonable pricing and satisfactory ROI. On the other hand, Amazon Aurora stands out for its scalability, performance, and user-friendly interface, with varying user experiences in terms of pricing and setup. Users highlight the need for enhancements in both products, such as performance optimization and improved usability.
Features: SQL Server stands out for its robustness, reliable handling of large data, seamless integration with Microsoft products, comprehensive security measures, and user-friendly graphical interface. In comparison, Amazon Aurora excels in seamless scalability, easy-to-use interface, and impressive speed, allowing for efficient and smooth operations.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for SQL Server has been praised as straightforward and efficient, with flexible licensing options. In contrast, the experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Amazon Aurora is more varied. While some find the pricing competitive and appreciate the lack of upfront setup costs, others find the licensing terms complicated. Individual perspectives and requirements play a significant role in determining the experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing., SQL Server offers significant improvements in efficiency, data management, and cost savings, with seamless integration, robust security, and superior performance. On the other hand, Amazon Aurora provides a valuable ROI for its users.
Room for Improvement: The SQL Server product could benefit from improvements in usability, performance optimization, compatibility with other platforms, handling of complex queries, security features, and efficient handling of large datasets. On the other hand, Amazon Aurora could improve in terms of performance, scalability, backup and restoration processes, user interface usability, and pricing structure.
Deployment and customer support: The reviews indicate that the time required for establishing a new tech solution with SQL Server can range from a week to three months, with deployment and setup phases possibly being separate. The feedback for Amazon Aurora also varies, with deployment taking anywhere from a week to three months, and setup being completed in the same timeframe or an additional week. Considering the context is essential for understanding the duration of these phases., Customers have praised the reliability and efficiency of SQL Server's customer service, while Amazon Aurora's support team has been commended for their prompt assistance and knowledge. Differences lie in specific areas of support provided.
The summary above is based on 42 interviews we conducted recently with SQL Server and Amazon Aurora users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The solution’s scalability is good since we don’t need to take a maintenance window during unpredictable workloads. I like the solution’s behind-the-scenes happenings. It is a great feature."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon Aurora is SQL standardization, it doesn't have its own syntax which is good. It has a lot of hands-off self-management type of activities, such as log rolling and auto-scaling."
"The provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer."
"Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code."
"The most valuable feature is that the maintainability is offloaded to the service provider. I don't have to maintain a database or do any administrative tasks, which comes in handy."
"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do multiple-read and single-write. These are the kinds of features that we were interested in, and Aurora takes care of that natively."
"The performance is good."
"It is fairly easy to work with. I like the high-availability options, like mirroring for example, and the high-availability groups."
"The fact that SQL Server fully integrates within the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a plus."
"I have found the most valuable features to be the flexibility and the vast amount of features available."
"As a data warehouse and storage solution, it's quite good."
"It is the latest technology and pretty powerful in terms of the high availability of the virtual server."
"SQL Server is quite stable. And now we are using the Lattice 2017 version."
"It works fine in terms of performance and stability."
"There is improvement needed to have more developer focus. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a stand-alone solution outside of Amazon. Amazon has a tendency to favor developing web-based clients, which may not always provide the fastest or most responsive solution as desired."
"I would like to see more AI-related features in future releases."
"It would have been helpful if they had provided some benchmarking numbers."
"The product's distributed query process for MySQL needs improvement."
"It is a bit costly. The features are quite good, and I wouldn't say it requires any technical improvements. But from a cost perspective, some clients wouldn't go for Aurora because of that."
"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."
"I would like to see performance insights on the database based on the queries. Currently, we use SolarWinds as the monitoring tool. I would like to leverage SolarWinds’ performance insights in AWS services. SolarWinds gives larger insights when we run performance issues."
"Microsoft support is an issue unto itself."
"There are certain shortcomings in the scalability of the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"I would like to see improvements made to the stability of SQL Server, as well as more analytics requirements."
"The solution could improve by being more user-friendly."
"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."
"SQL Server could improve the integration with nonrational database solutions, such as MongoDB."
"We have no vision. We don't know when or how we have been hacked."
"The free version of SQL Server is time-limited before updating to the paid version."
Amazon Aurora is ranked 10th in Relational Databases Tools with 7 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. Amazon Aurora is rated 7.8, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon Aurora writes "Easy-to-manage platform with a valuable auto-scaling feature ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". Amazon Aurora is most compared with Oracle Database, MariaDB, CockroachDB, MySQL and SAP HANA, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and MySQL. See our Amazon Aurora vs. SQL Server report.
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We monitor all Relational Databases Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
