SQL Server Scalability
RK
Ranjeet Kumar
Senior General Manager at Worly Plumbing Supply, Inc.
The solution’s performance and scalability are very good. Our clients for SQL Server are enterprise businesses.
I rate the solution a 9 out of 10 for scalability.
HS
HarkamalSingh
Works at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
It is very scalable, but its scalability also depends on what you're using. If it is on-premise, you have to do everything on your own to scale it out. It is easy, but you have to get the infrastructure ready to scale it out. It is a manual process. If you're on a cloud, then it is pretty much easy and straightforward if your cloud has those availabilities. It also has a Hyperscale, where you can put the upper and lower limit, and it can scale up and down as per the use case and the compute that you need.
We have a lot of users. Everyone is connected to this. We have business users, technical users, application users, and integration users. We have 17,000 instances of SQL Server here with a lot of databases.
View full review »PJ
PeterJones
Professional Services Manager at Business Intelligence DA
Many of my customers are using SQL Server 2019.
Today, a 15TB data warehouse is not very big. However, if you consider this customer has 300 stores nationally, selling up to half a million items per day, then that's a fairly substantial customer.
There are bigger customers that you need to worry about. They want more products and more speed, but they have more money.
The bottom line is that SQL Server is still an SMP database. Because we're only talking about data warehousing, there are some fairly simple rules to apply to get it to scale up quite well.
You can put two billion rows in a partitioned table. This customers largest partitioned table is more than three billion rows. That is 10 years of stock history. We use that for forecasting. That's quite a lot when you're only paying $50,000 for the database license. A similar machine, 15 years ago, would cost approximately $2 million.
Clearly, you can't compare how well a $100,000 SQL Server running on Windows compares with a shiny new million-dollar Yellowbrick server. They are completely different classes.
Ultimately SQL Server SE is most suitable for a small to medium-sized business. In a data warehousing scenario, you can do a very passable job with SQL Server SE for enterprises up to half a million transactions per day.
Buyer's Guide
SQL Server
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SQL Server. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
The solution's scalability and performance depend on application size and data size. Overall, the performance is pretty good and decent. My company has 20-30 users.
PE
Phil Ernst
Chief Technology Officer at Wolff Logics
Compared to other solutions like MongoDB and MySQL, SQL Server is a scalable solution.
View full review »JA
Jem Ahmed
Software Engineer at Intelligent Systems
It is a scalable solution.
I deal with small, medium, and large-sized customers who use the tool.
MJ
seniorda483732
Senior Database Administrator at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
The solution scales pretty well. I would rate it at a four out of five. If a company needs to expand, it shouldn't be an issue.
It's used pretty extensively by a lot of people in our organization. It's used for everything from management to clerks and external users. Clients use it in some way, shape, or form.
I don't know whether SQL Server can support large organizations where the database size is more than 100 GB. It might be because of SQL Server, or it might be because of the programming of the software vendor, but a lot of people think that it is a problem with SQL Server. It can't handle a large amount of data or large data size.
In terms of its usage, about 90% of our applications are running on the SQL Server database. We have around 1,600 users for our software, and all the applications are connected to the SQL Server database.
View full review »HB
reviewer1264416
Domain architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »The number of users impacts the solution’s scalability.
100-500 users are using this solution.
The tool is pretty scalable. We had 100 users in our organization. We can scale the tool vertically and horizontally.
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.
View full review »I haven't tested the system for scalability. I use it for simple tasks.
As per our company's agreement with Microsoft, some of the software from Microsoft 10 was included in SQL Server when there were about 1,000 students attending database classes using it.
SQL Server offers easy scalability, allowing databases to grow as the data and user base expand.
View full review »MH
Mohammed Habeeb
System Administrator at ARTIc
SQL Server is scalable.
View full review »AM
Aju Mathai
Database Architect at Huron Consulting
With the new versions and Azure, which is in the cloud, these do accommodate scalability. Until the 2014 version, the scalability wasn't there, but from the 2016 version and above, I think they have taken all these scalability features into consideration.
View full review »Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
My company deals with organizations where the solution is used, with between 200 and 7,000 users.
SE
Simon Evans
IT Analysis at Kirkby (Tyres) Ltd
The solution is very scalability. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.
View full review »MM
Mpho Morake
Group CEO at Mmusi Group
It is scalable. There are a lot of users. There are over 300 applications using this solution. Each application has its own users. In the technical team, there are about 13 people working with it.
View full review »AK
Anandan Kanagarajan
Sr. Supervisor - Enterprises Application DBA at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
It's been scalable since 2016. With each version, they are adding more features which are very helpful.
View full review »YM
YahyaMahdy
Senior Data Engeer at Qbros
The data warehouse engine should be scalable. It's not scalable. We use it every single day.
I rate the solution's scalability a three out of ten.
View full review »RN
reviewer1695144
President at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
In terms of scalability, I haven't seen any problems with it. We have 120 users. Every once in a while we get a record lock in our data. It's very rare though. Once every six months somebody hits the same record and same night. It's very rare. You go out for a minute, come back in, and it's over.
I don't have any Fortune 5,000, Fortune 2000, or Fortune 1000 companies. According to the governmental definition, they're small, they're SMB, but my big client is 200 million. To me, that's a lot of money-
But in the eyes of the government, they're still a medium company. I have clients with 1,000 people, but they're only a $50 million company. Those are not for profits. They're paying people 10 bucks an hour. It's very hard to categorize that if you're looking at it from a business perspective versus a technical perspective. I have a client with 1,000 people with 82 sites. So that's a technical challenge, but they don't have the same kind of money as the other people do.
It's a different way to categorize it.
View full review »PL
reviewer1056471
Manager Global Identity & Access Management at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
SQL Server is a product you can scale. You can add and remove modules as needed.
View full review »BL
reviewer1389651
Certified Adjunct Faculty, School of Engineering and Computing at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
DV
Dany Van Den Steen
Database Administrator at Court of Audit Belgium
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.
View full review »JM
JasminaMarkovic
BI Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Scalability is dependent on memory.
The matter at hand pertains to whether we are discussing an issue in general or specifically in the context of on-premises environments. However, it is clear that memory and capacity are significant factors in both scenarios.
Proper management of memory and capacity is essential to ensure smooth system operation and prevent any performance or stability issues.
As a result, it is essential to handle these issues completely and appropriately in order to meet the system's requirements.
View full review »FR
Francisco Racionero
CEO Owner at ALESON ITC
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.
The solution can scale quite well. If your company needs to expand it, it can do so pretty easily. It's not hard.
We currently have 5,000 users on the solution.
We do plan to increase usage in the future.
View full review »MP
Marcelo Pissinati
IT Cybersecurity and Compliance Coordinator at Plaenge
I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.
I plan to increase my usage in the future.
View full review »We haven't faced any scalability issues. We have over 200 users.
View full review »We have found the solution to be scalable. If a company needs to expand, it can do so.
View full review »SS
Shivanshu Srivastav
IT Manager : HOD at Condot Systems
Scalability is good. We have worked on almost 25 loads of data and 35 loads of records in a month. Most were working fine, but after time the process slows down a bit. In MS SQL, the initial 70% would work fine, but when the database starts and the load gets full, it causes slow processing. But considering the cost, features, and compatibility with Microsoft, it's a very stable database.
View full review »RN
reviewer1572765
Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
We don't have any issues with the scalability of SQL Server.
We have hundreds of thousands of applications using this solution.
View full review »More than 1000 concurrent users are using this solution. We use horizontal and vertical data partitioning, allowing us to manage and distribute data across tables efficiently. Additionally, we use sharding for certain databases to handle large datasets effectively.
PC
Prajith Chowthee
Independent Consultant at Unaikui
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.
The tool is scalable. Four other users have access to the server. We are not planning to increase the usage.
View full review »AR
Abdelkader Raway
Works at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
We have two users in my company. The ERP system has nearly two users. We have about five users for subsidies and the sister company.
I'm not going to increase our usage because I'm going to the cloud. We're going to the cloud, according to my plan. Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft cloud, or NetSuite. Because they are both cloud-based, I don't need to increase the number of SQL server users, either for administration or for users.
View full review »SS
Satyam Saxena
Senior Software Developer at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It may be a licensing issue, but sometimes its operating speed becomes slow if we have multiple users. It's lacking some performance, but it's acceptable because we have a heavy load. And I would like to add that we're running SQL Server and SSIS at the same time. So while I've found that SQL Server is quite fast, SSIS is a part of SQL Server. It is just for data testing in India. But if a person knows SSIS, then they usually have very little knowledge about SQL and vice versa.
I know both of them. I found that maybe it's a bad habit, but I'm using SSIS packages. And in the SSIS package, I'm using Toolbox from SQL Server to improve the latency. Implementing both together takes a little time. And one more point is data handling. I am just forwarding the error names, and there are multiple errors in the SQL Server tool, but what if a person comes to work under me and has only one or two years of experience? Sometimes it might be difficult for them to understand what the errors mean. For example, when joining data, it's easy to implement the inner joint. In the inner joint, there are two columns, so when there's an output error, someone who is inexperienced with SQL Server might not understand. Error messages should be a little more precise and defined, so it's easy to understand.
View full review »AM
reviewer1635153
VP Global Information Technology at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »TP
Tim Platson
Solutions Architect at One Click
Scalability-wise, it's outstanding. The one limitation it has is that at the very, very high end of petabytes-sized databases, it doesn't scale as well as Oracle. Still, you're not going to run into very many exceptionally large databases. Almost 100% of the use cases for it scale very well.
View full review »MP
reviewer1570953
Database Administrator at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
It is very scalable. You can run the database engine on the C drive, or you can run it on a large cloud array or a disk array. Currently, we just have developers and testers accessing it.
View full review »It is a scalable product.
View full review »TL
Tim Lenz
SQL Database Administrator at Aurora Mental Health Center
The solution is very easy to scale. We have between 300 to 500 people that use it.
View full review »TN
ThembaNhlapo
System engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
The scalability of SQL Server is relatively easy. if you are in a Microsoft environment, then I think that it relatively it should not be that difficult. However, I haven't been on a project whereby we have had to scale.
SQL Server is suitable for all companies in my experience, ranging from small to large enterprises businesses.
View full review »The solution is scalable. However, we do not have many large servers using SQL Server anymore, we have moved to SAP HANA.
We have approximately 2,000 users using this solution in my organization.
View full review »BC
BruceCollins
Senior Developer at a government with 51-200 employees
Scaling is easy if you need to do it. You simply set up a cluster and you can just grow it up.
In our organization, all the end-users are pretty much integrated into it and using it. As far as developers, there are two developers and me that are using it.
View full review »RU
reviewer1524594
Senior Solutions Architect at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »SM
Sanjeeb Mohanty
Global Head ICT (CITP & MIE) at The Aga Khan Academies
It has pretty good scalability. In terms of usage, we have two different types of usage. For end-computing usage, we have about 600 or 700 students who use the media labs. For Microsoft Navision and Track-It, we have about 100 staff members as users.
It is being used fairly extensively. Microsoft Navision is one of the core solutions of our business, and it is used on a daily basis. End computing is used by students. Because of the pandemic, for the last 14 months, everything is closed, and everybody is remote, so end computing has not been used, but Navision continued to be used. After the school reopens in each location, we will continue to use it even more. We definitely have plans for expansion.
View full review »The scalability of the product is pretty good. It can scale effectively and expands better than other options.
We have around 40 users on the solution currently.
Our main usage is not for the database and we simply use basic aspects of the platform.
View full review »It is pretty scalable. You can scale your machine and nodes. Instead of using just one node or one server, you can use multiple servers and then cluster them together for failover and performance. You can also do replication across sites. Currently, we have around 50 users.
View full review »RM
RogerMorera
Digital Transformation Architect at Comdata
It is scalable. You can get scalability by using the link servers, or you can create another instance in another server and make a link with that server. It is very quick.
We have around 50 users of this solution.
View full review »We had trouble scaling the solution to handle larger volumes of data. We have been able to scale out by adding CPU power and RAM, but other than by increasing the physical solution, we have not been able to do it very well. For example, we have not been able to do what we have done using Hadoop.
View full review »The scalability is not very good because when you add processors to the machine, the price of the license goes up. Scaling is very expensive. We have approximately 500 people who are using it.
View full review »SA
Scott Albritton
Applications Business Intelligence Analyst at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees
Microsoft makes life easy to expand your environment through clustering tools and after-hours operational scheduling features. SQL Server is easily suited for small businesses where it found huge popularity, but daily operations can sometimes be overlooked as the business grows causing intermittent operational kinks. I have seen a few small businesses determine that a slowing or overloaded SQL Server environment means they should look at more enterprise level databases, which is simply not the case.
Just like a Windows PC needs basic defragmentation maintenance to run effectively, SQL Server needs its own regular maintenance. There are many options available to improve the performance of SQL Server including the simple add-on clustering features which will balance excess load on the server.
In addition, database indexes need to either be created or re-indexed periodically. A database does not automatically know how an application was designed although it’s very good at trying to guess using built-in scheme mapping software. Creating indexes and related maintenance schedules specific to your environment can make a huge difference in how quickly SQL Server responds to data requests.
Disk partitions are another method for improvement. No matter how well SQL Server software is configured, it is limited by the hardware level. Underlying disk usage grows as data grows meaning the more data you add to the database results in the longer it will take for the database to find data on-disk. That’s when it’s time to either spread data across many independent disk sets or move to more expensive flash drives which save time by avoiding read & write disk operations.
These options, of course, require time, effort, and money, but they have been well worth the costs of doing business based on my experience.
View full review »The solution’s scalability is good.
View full review »BL
Bjarne Lindquist
Owner at 2 Bit
I don't have so much experience with scaling. It's my understanding that that task is a specialist job.
View full review »FZ
reviewer1641576
Principal Database And Cloud Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
SQL Servers and other databases are all scalable. I just don't see any problem with scalability.
View full review »DG
reviewer1001628
Information Systems Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees
It is very scalable, and you don't run into indexing issues like you would with a flat file. I don't think we've even scratched the surface in terms of its capabilities. Our databases are fairly small in comparison to others in our industry who are using the same software.
We've got about 40 users using it, and primarily, they don't touch the database directly. They're just using it through ERP and our document management system. They are just non-IT employees. They are office users.
We're using it fairly extensively for the core of our business software, and we will likely increase the usage of it. We've got some projects in the hopper that will take advantage of SQL Server. So, we plan on increasing our usage of it.
View full review »MM
reviewer2356620
Development Associate & Manager at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees
It is quite a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
My company's clients who use the solution are mostly enterprise businesses.
So far, I have found the solution to be quite scalable. If a company needs to expand it out, it can do so.
We have about 4,000 users on the solution currently. About five to seven different departments use it.
View full review »Since this is a relational order system, scalability has a limit. If your system is very big, you need bigger servers and you have to spend more money. We scale a system up to a certain level, and then we move or shift data to the warehouse, which is NoSQL. We then do not have any bottleneck in scaling. For using this technique we are happy with it.
It is hard to tell or count how much data we are using because being one of the leading companies in Bangladesh, we have many teams who work on it. Different teams work on many different technologies.
We have not had an issue with the scalability SQL Server.
View full review »US
Uchechi Sylvanus
Team Lead, Process Improvement at Fidelity Bank Plc
The product scales well. If you need to expand it, you can.
We have around 50 users on the solution right now.
View full review »PT
Paulo Toscano
Database Administration Team Leader at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
SQL Server is vertically scalable. We have about 3,000 people using this solution.
View full review »SL
reviewer1385976
Enterprise Architect at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
SQL Server claims to be good, scalability-wise, but we have had issues with it.
On the other hand, we have been using it for a lot of large applications and it has worked well in those cases. For the most part, it is good, and we have a lot of users.
View full review »I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten.
View full review »We have approximately 10 developers and architects using SQL Server. Additionally, we have approximately four end-users using the solution.
View full review »AS
Amir Saudi
Business Intelligence Manager at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees
It should be scalable within the coming years because data is growing and the business is growing.
Right now we have about 300 users, but by next year we might have around 2,000 because we also have a retail side, which could also use the platform. Some of their roles are in the executive layers and the managers layers, and reporting line people also.
We are planning to increase the usage. This is a transformation phase, so we are currently using SAP business objects, and we are on the Oracle database. We just moved to Azure cloud with the data warehouse and Power BI tools.
View full review »GK
reviewer1671969
Data Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I can't really speak intelligently about that because I haven't been on any of the real big ones yet.
View full review »SK
Santosh Kurakula
Group DWH and BI Senior Manager at Virgin Mobile Middle East and Africa
The solution is scalable and flexible.
We have approximately 15 people using the solution in my organization.
View full review »OK
OmidKoushki
Solution Architect at KIAN company
The solution is highly scalable. You are able to implement a SQL cluster mechanism for replicating the data between two nodes of the SQL Server. If one of the nodes is down the second node becomes active.
We have approximately 20 developers working directly with SQL Server and approximately 1,000 end-users that are working on the application that is behind the SQL Server.
View full review »The free version of SQL Server is time-limited before updating to the paid version. So, sort of more access and more work in your database to help process most of the time. It's better to purchase it for more secure functions.
View full review »LA
Lional Angelo
Manager Digital Technologies at a real estate/law firm with 51-200 employees
In terms of direct users, there are only a few. However, there are applications that are using SQL and those application's users are 100 plus, or maybe 300 to 400 plus users.
This company is in the phase of growth. If it grows as expected, then definitely the chances are high in terms of the number of users - which means we will scale up a bit.
It's absolutely scalable.
View full review »GS
Gheorghe SANDRU
Managing Partner at Bizz Advisers SRL
Scalability-wise, it's okay.
View full review »This product can withstand with 250-300 users.
View full review »MM
reviewer2112948
Consultant at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Five thousand users are using the solution.
View full review »IG
Irwin Gibson
Chief ICT Officer at Barbados Public Workers Cooperative Credit Union Ltd
The tool is scalable.
View full review »SQL Server is very scalable because we use it across a couple of different types of applications, such as micro-infrastructure setup and server farm.
The solution is suitable for any environment, such as small, medium, and large enterprises.
View full review »AS
Azeezulla Sheriff
General Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
This is a scalable solution.
View full review »Its scalability is good.
View full review »It's very easy to scale the solution in multiple ways. If a company needs to expand, it can do so easily.
View full review »RV
reviewer1624716
2de Solution Engineer - storage & compute at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The product scales well. If you need to expand it, you can do so.
We have 900 to 1,000 people using it currently.
View full review »MS
reviewer1428423
Head of Technical Support at a real estate/law firm with 51-200 employees
The solution is very scalable. The only thing that would limit its ability to expand is how your environment is designed. That said, a company should have no trouble scaling it if they would like to.
There are only five of us using the solution right now.
We do plan to increase usage in the future.
View full review »DI
Dimitris Iracleous
Lead Technical Instructor at codehub
The solution is quite scalable, as it can be extended to replicate many computers. It can be used in a virtual environment. One would, of course, make use of the cloud. We are now gaining experience in cloud programs such as Azure and AWS.
MB
reviewer1494501
BI Developer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Scalability-wise, it's quite good. It's not scalable up to the big data type of thing that people are doing now. It's scalable up to a point, but it has been overtaken by newer products.
View full review »ST
reviewer1022898
Director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
It's somewhat scalable.
View full review »AS
Aditya Sawant
Assistant Manager at ECU
It is quite scalable compared to other data engines and the latest version has increased support for new technologies, like Python and other languages. It's a big improvement on the previous version. We have 30 to 40 SQL servers installed and they're used for different different applications; internal applications, client applications as well as for ETA tools and reporting purpose. We probably have up to 200 users querying the SQL server of the product on a daily basis.
View full review »SB
Shanti Sahu
Cloud Data Architect (Data service Team) at NTT Data India Enterprise Application Services Pri
SQL Server is scalable. We started with one hundred data points and now we have up to 1500, it's scalable. You just need to install the new version every time it comes out with a new capability, such as SQL Server 2019 where you can do multiple things.
If I'm talking about the on-premises maintenance requirement, we need a DBA for that if the SQL maintenance is required. But if you move to the cloud this is automatically done by Microsoft itself. however, this still requires some maintenance though.
PS
Prakash Somasundaran
Project Advisor at A private sector Company
NY
reviewer2265342
Consultant at a tech company with self employed
We rarely have more than a few hundred users. It's more about the person using it since we don't have heavy, continuous use.
View full review »KG
reviewer1488372
Associate Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
This product is scalable, we have between 20 and 30 users in our company. We'll continue to use this product.
JJ
JohannesJoubert
Business Solutions Architect at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
Best practice setup is important to consider but when implemented correctly, it just runs.
View full review »NS
Navee Srichaiyanont
IT manager at IRPC PCL
I'm not sure about the capability of the solution's scalability. We've never really tested its capabilities, and it's therefore hard to gauge.
View full review »We did not encounter any issues with scalability. I have been able to create databases with billions of records with no degradation in performance. The partitioning has been a critical feature in enabling scalability.
View full review »I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.
View full review »We have around 100 users. The database isn't used directly, so users are not even aware that there is a SQL Server underneath.
View full review »The scalability of SQL Server is good. It can scale up to thousands of times more data than I have.
We have approximately 250 people using this solution in my organization.
View full review »This is a scalable solution.
View full review »AL
reviewer1652016
Senior Service Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
I haven't been utilizing the scale capabilities. I don't have a clear impression on that, however, for our purposes, we've never had an issue.
View full review »MF
Mohamed_Farouk
Information Technology Manager at OrchidaSoft
SQL Server is scalable. Our clients are medium-sized companies, not large. They don't have professional IT.
We have 20 people in our organization who are using this solution, but we have many clients who are using it. We sell our consultancy service to more than 200 clients every year.
View full review »BM
Biswajit Mohanty
Senior Manager - RPA & Transition at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The solution is very capable of scaling. A company should have no trouble expanding the solution as needed.
You can always add on to the server or make compartments into it.
We have a team of about 200 or more people using the solution.
We do plan to continue using the solution.
View full review »The solution is 100% scalable to any kind of circumstances you find yourself in. It's easy to use and ready for any type of environment you're working on. It's scalable to any environment as well as to any amount of data. The only limiting aspect of scalability is if you're working on a local system or working on a server-based system. The physical data storage capacity is the only hindrance to scalability. If you've got sufficient data storage, then the scalability is endless.
The only people, to my knowledge, that have any access to the SQL Servers would be the administration and the department of development. The numbers range from anything from 50 to 150 people at any given time.
I'm not sure if we have plans, as an organization, to increase usage.
View full review »PV
reviewer2384076
BI Specialist at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Our clients for SQL Server are usually enterprise businesses.
I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten for scalability.
MN
Michael Ndwiga
IT Officer at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
The scalability could be improved.
View full review »JM
reviewer1715886
SQL Server Senior Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have approximately 300 instances of SQL Server.
I have approximately five customers using this solution.
View full review »YT
reviewer1478394
Information Security Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
The solution seems scalable to me.
View full review »FA
Florent ADODO
IT Assistant at Hotel 2 Fevrier
The performance in terms of simultaneous connection must be reviewed.
View full review »HP
hugodpereira
Computer engineering student at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees
The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.
As a student, I don't yet have plans to increase usage of the product.
View full review »HV
Helder Valente
Infrastructure and Networks at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
It's a scalable solution and we have 1,000 users in our organization.
We are stabilizing, so we are not going to increase our usage with SQL.
View full review »VP
reviewer1501629
Chief Information Officer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
In terms of scalability, it has some room for improvement.
We have 20 people in our organization who are using this solution.
View full review »MM
reviewer1187943
Director of Data Analytics at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It scales with a lot of effort. When comparing it to Exadata, it's easier to scale with Exadata.
View full review »SP
SashisekharPanda
General Manager/MVP at Yotta Infrastructure Solutions LLP
Stability and scalability are both good. It suffices for our current requirements, but if we want to scale up in the future, it has limitations.
НЕ
Недашковский Евгений
Senior SQL DBA at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Unfortunately, SQL Server cannot be scaled out so easily as some NoSQL solutions. There are some options that may allow it to work with quite enormous workloads. For example, try to google how Stack Overflow is built (yes, it works with SQL Server). They have quite an interesting architecture.
View full review »BG
Gh0ce
Systems Analyst/DBA at Vecima Networks
I have not run into scalability issues. It feels very scalable.
View full review »SA
Albeez
IT Director at DAR AL ARKAN
There were no scalability issues.
View full review »The solution is easily scalable because of its flexibility.
We have approximately three people who are using this solution.
View full review »VB
reviewer1803756
Data Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability has been good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.
View full review »BR
reviewer1037115
senior system integrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is very good. If a company needs to expand, it can do so.
View full review »The solution is scalable.
We have approximately 30 people in my organization using this solution.
View full review »EM
reviewer1703928
Enterprise Solutions Architect at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
VG
reviewer1322280
Regional Head Customer Experience at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
We have not scaled the solution extensively, but I do not foresee any problems.
View full review »ID
Irad Dukad
IT Manager at ducart
I believe the solution to be scalable and plan to increase our usage.
View full review »AG
Alberto Geminiani
Technical Director at Progetti e Soluzioni
We haven't really scaled the solution all that much. At the moment, we have measured the scalability in a horizontal way. When we needed to have more installation and more capacity, we split the database into a different SQL Server instance.
In the future, we'll likely need to consider scalability more. We are also moving in the last two years, also to a different architecture from a monolithic to a more microservice architecture. Maybe the scalability can be more easily handled in the applications that are talking to each other and leaving the database out of the equation.
While end-users are hard to quantify, I can say that likely half a million users have come through our system for transactions.
In the near future, we will continue to use the solution. We might use it for the next four or five years, although it is hard to say.
View full review »AM
reviewer1359642
Sr. DBA/Developer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
The scalability of the solution is very good. A company that needs to expand should be able to do so fairly easily.
We have about ten people using SQL at our organization. Some are in Operations. Some are developers.
The data we have is constantly expanding and growing for us, so we already are increasing the capacity of the SQL server. We'll continue to do so as necessary.
View full review »So far, we have had no scalability issues. I have read about instances where people encounter issues online, but fortunately enough I have never encountered issues.
View full review »SQL Server is a scalable solution.
We have approximately 200 users using this solution. We increase the number of users every year.
View full review »IH
reviewer1159494
Advisory Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »KJ
reviewer1233759
Deputy Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
We have over 2,000 users in our organization.
View full review »RZ
Roman Zubrytsky
Principal, Sr. IT Consultant at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
In terms of scalability, it would be closed to a high-availability group. So I would say it varies in scale.
View full review »CL
reviewer1621938
Senior BI Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
There are scalability limitations and this is why we are evaluating cloud alternatives.
I rate the scalability of SQL Server a four out of five.
View full review »MY
reviewer1523223
IT at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The solution is very scalable.
View full review »PR
reviewer1569966
Technical Specialist at a media company with 10,001+ employees
I don't really use it heavily, basically, my usage is quite small. It's been okay for me for my purposes. However, it's my understanding that it can scale.
We have more than ten engineers that currently use the product regularly.
View full review »SJ
reviewer1407519
Chief Technology Officer & Vice President, Delivery at a recruiting/HR firm with 1-10 employees
Scaling is a challenge because you cannot scale horizontally. We've run into a couple of scenarios where we were not able to scale it easily.
View full review »AW
reviewer1566654
Database Operation Assistant Manager at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is adequate but could improve. We have approximately 100 people using the solution in our company.
View full review »With respect to scalability, I can say that the cloud version is scalable. I don't have much to say about how an on-premises deployment scales. However, in general, both Oracle and Microsoft products scale really well.
View full review »The solution can scale, however, it's dependant on the hardware. It's not limitless.
There are about ten users using the solution at this time.
We do have plans to increase usage in the future.
View full review »MM
reviewer1522923
Head of IT, CTO at a insurance company with 51-200 employees
We are a small company. We don't have any issues with this and we are fully virtualized. If we need to, we can extend the amount of CPUs as we want.
Our core system is being used by 50 users, but they are not accessing the SQL Server. We have approximately 10 users in our company who are using the SQL Server.
View full review »MS
Mike Sax
Vice President, Product Engineering at Logitix
The solution is extremely scalable. If a company needs to expand, it can do so without any problems.
View full review »MA
MartinAnderson
Owner at BNS
It has limited scalability, but it's perfectly adequate for our needs. We apply vertical scalability to it and not horizontal.
We are a very small software development company, scaling is not an issue for us.
View full review »RL
Rmegio Lawag
Technical Department Manager at Direcbusiness Technologies, Inc.
The product is scalable.
View full review »HT
Hoang Ta
System Engineer at CMC CSI saigon
We are not running more than 1%. Scalability needs improvement.
We have 415 users in our organization.
We have plans to increase our usage.
We have an Active Directory system, so we can install antivirus on the endpoints.
View full review »VA
reviewer1162596
Data Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
I have found SQL Server to be scalable.
The solution is suitable for all-sized businesses.
View full review »SQL Server is a scalable system.
View full review »FN
Florent NOPOUDEM
Senior Database Administrator at ITGStore
The solution is scalable.
View full review »SR
reviewer1653840
Director -Data Architecture and Engineering
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.
The scalability issue could be why many are moving to solutions, such as Teradata or other high-end on-premise solutions. Additionally, cloud solutions offer better scalability options.
View full review »MC
reviewer1642500
Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Similar to Microsoft SQL, it is easy to scale.
We have a team of 300 people who are using this solution.
View full review »MP
Mohammed-Pasha
CEO at SkyNet
This solution is scalable. It is easy to expand.
View full review »ST
MD.SIHAB TALUKDAR
System Engineer at asa
We are the largest micro-credit finance company with more than thirty companies internally. We have 25,000 employees using the business application and SQL does not scale to our requirements.
I think that Oracle is better suited to smaller applications.
View full review »If you know how to work with the product and leverage its various features and possibilities, then you can achieve great scalability.
View full review »PN
Paul Nockolds
Data Analyst at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
When upsizing, some tools do not do a very good job of scaling efficiently and lots of after tweaks need to be made.
View full review »There were some avoidable issues, primarily due to a lack of scaling in our own design.
View full review »TU
TonderayiUsada
Managing Director at D3
The scalability of SQL Server is good.
View full review »IC
reviewer1646865
ICT Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
You can scale this solution if you need to. It's not an issue.
Everyone in our company is using the product. We have about 80 users on it currently.
View full review »OB
Ossama Benaziz
Operations Director at ALTERSIS Performance
The solution could be more scalable. Oracle scales better for companies that need to expand.
We have two to three customers that use the solution currently.
View full review »DB
reviewer1473555
Sr Tech Business Analyst, Group Data Projects & Ventures at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
In general, the solution is scalable. Microsoft, compared to the others, tends to focus more on the programming ability of the solution rather than the user experience. Rather than making it more user-friendly, they tend to make it more program-friendly.
We have about 70 users on the solution currently.
It's my understanding that the client is planning to scale up to be able to take on more customers in the near future. They may therefore increase usage.
View full review »There were no scalability issues, even though the Dev Ed does not offer the same level of performance and scalability that the equivalent Enterprise Ed offers.
Pertaining to the hosted Data Science package that we have been exploring, we have found an important increase in scalability when comparing the performance of a given solution running as hosted, and the same solution running on the same server with only client R tools.
This scalability advantage presents itself as an important reason to consider these tools as a viable solution to some of our DW customers.
There were no scalability issues.
View full review »We did not encounter any scalability issues. This is the case even though the Developers Edition does not offer the same level of performance and scalability that the equivalent Enterprise Edition offers.
View full review »SB
Sipho Ngubonde
Admin at IEC (Electoral Commission of South Africa)
This solution is scalable.
View full review »VC
reviewer938061
Sr. Solution Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »MK
Mazen Kassem
Senior Digital Services Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
You can scale the product. You can increase and decrease the storage as needed. It's very easy.
The amount of users on the solution is anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 users.
View full review »SW
Stephan Warreyn
GF at Innopact GmbH
The solution scales well. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with ease.
Three people are using the solution in our organization.
View full review »KV
Karel Van Der Walt
Data Architect at ACPAS Loan Management Software
The solution scales well. if a company needs to expand its SQL server, it's not a problem to do so.
We do plan to continue to use it going forward. I'm unsure as to if we have plans to scale it, however.
View full review »JP
reviewer1470330
Analytics Manager - Data and Capability at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The scalability for the solution is good, at least where it concerns the cloud. Using the cloud makes everything very easy to scale. On-remises, if you run out of dick space, it's a bit difficult.
View full review »KG
reviewer1413750
Lead Data Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is a concern with the scalability because it's an on-premise technology.
Scaling always comes with more costs and also the licensing cost increase, which makes it complex, and more difficult.
We have backend developers, data engineers, data scientists, and analysts using this solution.
View full review »磊刘
Lei Liu
DBA,data architectuire at LG CNS Co.
When do "sp_rename" or "table rebuild" , the cluster index or non-cluster index no needs to rebuild at same time
View full review »Scalability depends on the version. I have to know ahead of time what version I need, but that is typical of all database software. However, as long as I build it correctly, it works great.
View full review »HG
reviewer1595568
Technical Content Writer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
It's not scalable. It hinders your performance as it's slow in nature and you need experienced people to work on it. That is why it's not very scalable.
We currently have ten to 15 users on the solution.
At this time, we have no plans to increase usage. We are focusing more on MongoDB.
View full review »MO
Manjunatha OK
Marketo Consultant at Webtech software servies
The scalability is good for simple applications. However, the problem with scalability is if the application is too large, it cannot handle it. We have to depend on other database servers.
View full review »AK
reviewer977976
System Architect, SCRUM Product Owner at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
SQL Server is scalable.
View full review »Yes, I encountered issues in the CPU intensive application, like web crawlers. It was difficult to reach the desired scalability through the fine tuning options available.
View full review »DK
reviewer1314546
Senior Systems Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees
It is scalable. We have more than a thousand users who use this solution. It is being used heavily, and we don't have any plans to increase its usage.
SY
cto267069
CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We have 150 users on the solution currently.
View full review »PS
reviewer1643577
Project Manager at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »YA
reviewer1519596
Chief of Information Technology at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
We have approximately 20 to 30 users of the solution in my organization here in Colombia, Mexico.
View full review »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.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »
No, scaling was easy with SQL. We never had an issue.
View full review »
AJ
Abaso Jadhav
Data Analyst
SQL Server is scalable. I can't say if we'll increase usage in the future because I'm only working here as an analyst. It's a company decision. If necessary, then I can make a recommendation. I can go for that if the client wants, so it depends entirely on our client. If the client wants Oracle instead of Microsoft, I don't have an option.
View full review »JP
reviewer1561038
Chief Technology Officer at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees
I find the solution not to be scalable.
There are approximately six people in our company using SQL Server.
View full review »EK
reviewer1601793
Sr Lead Data & Information Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It is scalable, and we have had no issues so far.
View full review »EN
reviewer1564890
Head of Data Analytics at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The solution is scalable to a point but not for very large enterprise.
View full review »GV
reviewer1476273
Manager with 501-1,000 employees
We have around approximately 600 or 700 users of this solution. Currently, everybody is using this solution, and we don't have a plan to increase its usage.
View full review »YW
Yasin Bin Wasim
Information Security Engineer at a security firm with 11-50 employees
It is a scalable solution.
My installation requires SQL Servers, so I have to continue using them.
View full review »VS
Victor Sokolov
DWH Architect at B2BSoft
If we talk about just standard RDBMS, it is very scalable because we don't have to scale platforms.
View full review »RS
Rahul Kumar Singh
Software Developer at OATI
No scalability issues.
View full review »DM
DenisMunger
Chief of Engineering at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
We are capturing 1 million calls per month. The free version can’t scale this much data.
View full review »No scalability issues.
View full review »JI
reviewer1707912
System Analyst and Team Lead at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »RP
reviewer1362969
IT Specialist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's relatively stable.
View full review »OY
reviewer1503438
Specialist Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We don't use SQL Server as our primary product. Our focus is on safe customer SQL admin as we don't want problems with customer data in our system.
View full review »Unfortunately, this database doesn't have a good concept of partition table. If you need to create monthly (Jan. to Dec.) partitions in one table, this action creates 12 different files for the same table. In others databases, this process is more transparent and capable to create partitions inside the same database.
View full review »FK
Faruk Kutlu
Managing Partner at Veribir Ltd
The solution is scalable, we have found it to be vertically scalable, but horizontal scaling, we have not used it for this purpose.
We are mostly using this solution for internal use, not for public services. We have approximately 10 developers using it.
View full review »I have found it to be scalable.
View full review »CM
reviewer1489908
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The scalability potential depends on the resources. If the resources are enough, we can scale it. For us, it's already enough. However, if a company plans to expand, it should be prepared for that beforehand.
We have more than ten users on the solution currently.
View full review »IF
reviewer1593270
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The scalability is very good. We have five people in my organization using this solution in my organization.
View full review »I have found the solution to be scalable.
View full review »i didn't use it like admin, i don't know.
View full review »RP
reviewer1288086
Project manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
In general, it is scalable, but we are only using the single-server mode. We are not using any kind of clustering. Therefore, I cannot say anything from my personal experience about the scalability of Microsoft SQL Server.
View full review »No, federal vs clusters approach explains you well that you can search for them.
It was average.
View full review »WL
reviewer1484775
Senior Programmer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
While I personally haven't gone beyond 50 or so users, it's my understanding that as long as you pay for the licensing, you can grow as much as you need to. There would be costs involved, however, the solution can scale if a company needs it to.
I'd love to have Microsoft explain to me the scaling process so that I could better understand it. Right now, I'm in the dark.
View full review »There were no issues with scalability.
SP
reviewer1614828
Chief Information Officer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
SQL Server has been very scalable.
We have approximately 200 users using the solution in my organization.
View full review »SA
Shafeeq Ahamed
Enterprise Solutions Department Manager at Smart Vision
SQL Server is both scalable and stable.
View full review »MG
reviewer1546989
CEO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Its scalability is okay.
View full review »SS
reviewer1085256
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
This is a scalable product. It is being used in three or four projects with a total of between 50 and 100 people.
View full review »No issues with scalability.
View full review »Not much of an issue to date.
View full review »
Yes, mostly connected to bad code.
View full review »
SA
reviewer1680246
Chief Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We have approximately 200 users that use an application that uses the SQL Servers database.
View full review »Currently no as we use our own load balancer to enable us to scale to any level.
View full review »CL
reviewer1410678
Data Analyst at a tech company with 51-200 employees
We have 10 users in our organization who are using this solution.
We have a team made up of engineers, data analysts, and some developers to maintain this solution.
We have plans to increase your usage.
View full review »We have never really had a problem with the scalability of the solution.
View full review »KH
reviewer1517148
Program Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We have between 40 and 50 applications running on it, which are used by many people.
Yes, we did, with the 2008 version.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
SQL Server
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SQL Server. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.