SQL Server Reviews

SQL Server is our main database solution. For example, we use it for our contact center software.

In Poland, SQL Server is the most popular database engine, and overall, our customers like it.

For small-scale businesses, Microsoft could improve by removing some limits in SQL Express.

In the future, it would be a benefit to have web-based management capabilities.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

Five years ago there were some stability issues but in the current version, the stability is good.

The solution is scalable.

We use the documentation provided online by Microsoft that has been helpful. We do not need to use technical support because we have many high-level technical staff who know how to use the solution.

The initial setup is very simple.

For smaller companies, they find this solution expensive.

I rate SQL Server an eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

We have found there are many useful features such as the solution is continually being upgraded, ETL capabilities for extracting and transformation, and it is very easy to use.

The solution has been really stable in my experience.

We have approximately 20 to 30 users of the solution in my organization here in Colombia, Mexico.

The initial setup is simple.

The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive.

I rate SQL Server a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

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.

More than five years.

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.

More than five years.

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.

Most of SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions. They are easy to configure and maintain.

It provides the best performance and an easy way to monitor and troubleshoot problems.

Indexing, execution plans, and the SQL Server Management Studio performance.

Over seven years.

No.

No.

Medium.

No.

Complex design, easy configuration.

It is not very expensive and is suitable for an international company, like what I am working with. Free licenses are suitable for small companies, too.

No.

Stable and easy to administrate.

The ability to browse table structures and re-design it easily.

It improved the efficiency in giving service to clients, and allowed to me make all kinds of important reports easily.

The compiler should be much more precise and give you more information about the error.

I've used it for two and a half years.

No issues encountered.

Running long and complicated queries could make the software crash. You should run them part by part instead (i.e. with stored procedures).

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

I haven't had to contact them.

Technical Support:

They give quick, and helpful, responses. About 9/10.

This was the solution I've used.

It's pretty straightforward, and usually everything goes smoothly. Everything was user-friendly and took me a minimum amount of time to understand how everything works.

We did it in-house.

The price is pretty high, buy it's worth getting the license.

No other options were evaluated.

Personally, I love Microsoft products and I’m pleased with this one as well. I would advise you to get it.

Security, lower cost, ease of maintenance and administration, performance. When all of these are considered, our business is able to run faster, more securely, with SQL as the back-end.

The Management Studio front end still needs work as does Indexing.

14 years

No, SQL installs well.

No, SQL was stable for our applications.

No, scaling was easy with SQL. We never had an issue.

Customer Service: Do not expect Microsoft to be in a hurry to get to you, but I have always found their support to be helpful.Technical Support: I would rate the support as average.

We also used Oracle. We supported both with our application.

SQL is very easy to setup.

In-house.

We also used Oracle. We supported both with our application.

Make sure you have your prerequisites installed and the proper amount of resources dedicated. You should not have a problem.