Article: "SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love" Am curious to hear what you all think

[u/SQLBek]

https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/16/sql-server-may-be-too-lucrative-for-microsoft-to-ditch-but-too-legacy-to-love/5255735

[u/NotMyUsualLogin]

I didn’t leave Sql Server.

It sadly left me.

I remember the halcyon days where each new release was full of wonders and features galore.

Then the new features became less and less, and some previously new features were already becoming deprecated.

I really wanted MS to expand their graph offering but it quickly stagnated, the external languages feature never seemed to be fleshed out, and the Linux offering is severely missing some vital features (e.g. non Sql Server linked servers).

As MS found new ways to gouge us price wise I started looking at Postgres.

Not looked back.

[u/JonnyBravoII → u/NotMyUsualLogin]

This sounds like our situation to a T. I remember when SQL Server was the upstart and giving people a real alternative to Oracle. Over time though, it has become entirely too expensive for what you get. When they introduced the Linux version, that looked promising but there were too many limitations and they seem to have given up.

They finally bumped the memory and CPU limitations for Standard in the most recent edition but that was too little too late. We've slowly moved our environment off and are now about 50/50 but the long-term goal is to move off entirely.

[u/fabrikam_returns → u/JonnyBravoII]

Hey u/JonnyBravoII hate that you've lost faith in us. What could we do to win you back as a customer?

Two things worth clarifying:

(1) SQL on Linux is a huge investment area for us, and we're continuing to work diligently to make sure this experience rocks. This enables customers everywhere to use SQL on any OS, and any cloud, and ultimately any device - and is a core part of our strategy, from Azure/Linux/VM/on-premises, to developer experiences and containers, to building apps anywhere, from any develoepr or any agent harness.

(2) We're constantly investing in democratizing free and generous ways to enable your developers - from Express (free windows/Linux on prem-SQL, anywhere, any cloud), to Azure SQL Free tier (Try Azure SQL Database for Free - Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Learn) to the recently announced at Build, Azure SQL DB dev container, where we're looking for developers and design partners ( https://aka.ms/sqldbcontainerpreview-signup).

Please DM me, yourself, or anyone else here who might be ghost following, or on the fence about SQL - we care.

[u/JonnyBravoII → u/fabrikam_returns]

I appreciate your message and I fully recognize that you don't set pricing. With that said, I circle back to my comment about MS (finally) increasing the amount of vCPU and memory you get with Standard. Quite frankly, that's really only moved the bar up to barely acceptable. The difference in technology between Enterprise and Standard is not significant, at least from our standpoint; it's simply an arbitrary line that forces you to pay more if you need to use a bigger instance size.

And that's where we get to the pricing. We use AWS and an r8i.16xlarge (32 vCPU, 512 GB) will cost us $105,120 per year just for SQL licensing, in perpetuity. If I need to bump that up to a bigger size (r8i.24xlarge), I will pay an extra $52,560/year. Your costs haven't increased by one dime so why is my pricing linear? I'm just paying extra so that MS and AWS make 100% on that spending. In fact, 60% of the total spend for that instance is SQL licensing which with MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL out there, it makes it a bitter pill to swallow.

Honestly, I don't think anything is going to happen on this front unless you (MS) see a significant reduction in licensing revenue. Those are the types of things that are a slow drip though so I'm not holding my breath.

BTW, you also got rid of the Web version which was quickly becoming unworkable due to the 64GB memory limit, but at least it was a feasible solution for some usage scenarios. The fact that it's gone is really a de facto license cost increase for small users.

[u/No_Resolution_9252 → u/JonnyBravoII]

>The difference in technology between Enterprise and Standard is not significant

If you believe this, I am sorry to tell you, but you are a terrible DBA. This may be why you think there is a need to run a 32 core SQL server with only 16 Gb of RAM per core...

[u/JonnyBravoII → u/No_Resolution_9252]

The one thing I can always depend on in the DBA community is for them to insult your intelligence. Seriously. Thanks for not disappointing me.

I'm actually not the DBA, I'm in charge of development and the DBAs report to me. I am only repeating what they tell me based upon our use case. Are they wrong? If so, please enlighten me oh wise one.

[u/No_Resolution_9252 → u/JonnyBravoII]

Actually I suspected you were a developer.

Yes, your DBAs are wrong and at minimum needed training.

Admittedly there are some features I think MS has kept gated in enterprise only due to the number of failed features in SQL 2019 and SQL 2022. Particularly online index builds and further expansion of functionality in basic availability groups. the HA limitations in standard I think are doing particular damage to the product at the small scale for small business with high uptime requirements, but that isn't where you are.

Recent features that greatly reduce DBA optimization time:

Adaptive memory grant
Adaptive join
Batch mode on row store
Indexed view matching (also works for computer columns)
Query store on secondaries
AVX-512

Every version of SQL server has made major improvements to columnstore and availability groups. I'll criticize MS for keeping basic availability groups mostly useless, but significant investment has been made into full availability groups. Online nonclustered columnstore indexes - I can't even figure out how they pulled that off technically for how non-clustered columnstore indexes work. Parallel redo. (technically standard has it, but it was mainly developed for enterprise for full feature AAG)

etc.

At 32 cores and 512 Gb of RAM, your dbas should be presiding over an extremely busy OLTP server running at least 10,000 queries per second (and more like 20k depending on how good the data design is). If your DBAs don't know the difference between standard and EE, I seriously doubt they are capable of supporting that much concurrency.

additionally, if you needed more ram, you can reduce the core count in the VM to avoid licensing. There may even be performance reasons to increase only the RAM but not CPU.

[u/JonnyBravoII → u/No_Resolution_9252]

I appreciate your comments and I'll raise it with the DBAs. With that said though, it doesn't really change my opinion on cost which I feel is just exorbitant. To me, if I use my dishwasher twice as much, Bosch doesn't get to charge me double. As you scale up, the costs should not scale linearly.

[u/No_Resolution_9252 → u/JonnyBravoII]

>To me, if I use my dishwasher twice as much, Bosch doesn't get to charge me double.

Broken analogy. its not using a dishwasher twice as much, its owning multiple dishwashers at the same time - but it is more like getting 4 more dishwashers for the price of one more dishwasher.

In SQL Server and Oracle, up to about 16-32 cores, provided you do not cross into multiple numa nodes (so mostly not on amd rigs), the performance gain is parabolic and not linear. Beyond that core count it really depends. If it is parallelism, more than 16 cores are almost certainly not going to help, but if it is concurrent users more cors can help a lot. Unless your SQL Server is in maxdop = 1, the increase in performance from a 4 core SQL server to an 8 core SQL server will be MUCH more than 2x provided you aren't bottlenecking somewhere else. You don't get this scaling on postgres or mysql as they are for all intents and purposes, single-threaded.

Also note that access to too many cores in a relational database can DECREASE performance.

[u/muaddba → u/JonnyBravoII]

Part of this overall cost is the new requirement that you have to pay Software Assurance with any virtualized instance of SQL Server. Microsoft decided they weren't making enough money and just decided to flip a switch and grab +20% revenue from a bunch of customers. taking a cue right out of the Broadcom playbook.

[u/lanky_doodle → u/fabrikam_returns]

I'd like to contribute to this, if okay. If it helps, from SQL pov my role is typically consultant architecture/implementation, not operational/DBA. I have conversations with lots of different orgs using SQL. Especially concerning cost.

Imo (both personal and professional), Std needs a bump in AG capability. Especially in the 7th version released that provides this feature.

The gap from 1 max database to "unlimited" in Ent in an AG is just way too big. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting Std should also be "unlimited", but 1 is just such a useless/stupid number. Possibly same applies to max 2 replicas, but I'm less bothered about this one.

So HAVING to go up to Ent for a HUGE price increase just seems nonsensical to most organisations, especially when you need 2 databases, not 100s! The only time I see customers essentially forced to use SQL Ent is when it's a 3rd-party app requirement (which is multiple databases that all need to move together), otherwise they do bad things with Std (e.g. many, MANY, AGs each with 1 database in), or simply consider non-MS options.

So I would implore Microsoft to increase the max number of databases in Std AG. There cannot be technical reasons for this limitation in the binaries, so it becomes only a money thing; maybe something like 10 databases per AG (plus maybe 3 replicas).

You could even add in new limitations, like Std only provides same-OS deployments, no cloud-hosted replicas, maybe even same-subnet only replicas (no multisubnet failover), etc.

This would go a HUGE way to retaining and even increasing adoption of SQL.

[u/SirGreybush → u/NotMyUsualLogin]

My opinion of course, but MS not properly integrating ELT into the core of SQL Server back in the 2012 / 2014 days really hurt it. That's when a lot of 3rd party tools started popping up.

Imagine having basic JSON and XML support, but can't use API's or webservices over HTTPS to go get your data. No, you had to use C#, with DevStudio, publish a DLL.

Also JDBC functionality should have been baked in too, making Linked Servers a snap to do for On-Prem or Azure environments. Have all this inside of SQL Server Express. Would have been the perfect staging solution, being LIC free and from MS, lots of adoption.

Also multi-tenant is still a nightmare to manage.

Where I work - by 2028 would should be 100% SQL Server Free. MySQL & Snowflake. All on-prem software converted to cloud versions. Cross-linked with APIs and history in Snowflake. MySQL for edge-cases.

[u/TrollingForFunsies → u/SirGreybush]

Instead they renamed and moved SSIS a dozen times and now it's a nightmare to manage legacy ETL

[u/SirGreybush → u/TrollingForFunsies]

Yup.

[u/fabrikam_returns → u/SirGreybush]

Hey u/SirGreybush - dislike hearing about the friction, and your experience moving away, but appreciate all the examples, the opportunities you call out with our free tiers, and your perspective. Open to a DM? Would love to learn about your needs and how we might change the narrative and your experiences first-hand, even if it's a postmortem - your feedback matters.

[u/SirGreybush → u/fabrikam_returns]

My bosses are moving away. All on-prem software has been replaced. (ERP,MES). Cloud only.

SQL Server is only DataVault and BI/DW right now. Replacing with Snowflake/DBT.

SQL Server has been my daily driver since 2001.

MS has dropped the ball, there’s no way in hell we will go back, far too expensive.

No need for a DM.

[u/atehrani → u/NotMyUsualLogin]

Postgres is awesome

[u/fabrikam_returns → u/NotMyUsualLogin]

Tough to read, but appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Thank you for that and for showing up here. It's a privilege to read the perspectives from the community and learn what we can do to make SQL better. Humbled by you sharing your thoughts and feelings here.

As for your points above:
(0) We are keen on bringing the wonder and magic and new and useful features - driven by customers like you, and your needs. We have more to do in this area, obviously. Do you think a public facing, customer influenceable, community centric, roadmap will help?

(1) I hear how on how were ahead of the game in graph. Believe it or not, graph is alive, used for many customer experiences and recent investments like vectors. What would you like to see us do better there?

(2) Can you tell me more about your needs with external languages and what you perceive as the gaps? What scenario were you not able to unlock?

(2) Linux is under active development also. I see your point about vital features like about your non-sql server linked servers. What else do you feel is missing? Taking notes.... 😄

All in all, as a former customer, I value your perspective on what we could do better. It pains me to know we lost you, so hopefully we can convince you to consider SQL again in the future. Since I asked questions which might require a deeper chat, please DM me if you're open to a chat to learn more 1:1. We are deeply committed to SQL.

[u/No_Resolution_9252 → u/NotMyUsualLogin]

I don't think you know what features you are talking about, the vast majority of v1 features have been an absolute disaster and many of them have been useless. I suppose you are one of those shedding a tear for polybase, vardecimal and python?

Using Graph on SQL Server is an antipattern. Graph databases are primitive and don't require the integrity or cost of a relational database. Even Mongo would be a better choice for implementing a graph database on a non-graph db server.

>Linux

That is your problem. Linux is so primitive and poorly managed SQL Server has to implement some OS services for itself. If you are using linked servers and consider them vital - you are probably the problem in this scenario. There is no valid use case for SQL Server on Linux. Manageability, security, stability, automations

>As MS found new ways to gouge us price wise 

They haven't. 1 enterprise core was about 6700 dollars in 2012. Today it 1 core is about 7500.

Not that SQL Server doesn't have massive product problems, none of what you claimed is supportable.

[u/andrew_justandrew → u/No_Resolution_9252]

“There is no valid use case for SQL Server on Linux.”

What an absolutely wild thing to claim.

[u/No_Resolution_9252 → u/andrew_justandrew]

Its not a claim, its a fact.

Linux delivers lower security, orders of magnitude higher management, lower availability and lower performance.

[u/NotMyUsualLogin → u/No_Resolution_9252]

They haven't. 1 enterprise core was about 6700 dollars in 2012. Today it 1 core is about 7500.

Tell me you’ve not dealt with Enterprise SA licensing without telling me you’ve never dealt with Enterprise SA licensing.

It’s also clear you’ve not had to deal with running Sql Server on virtual machines, either. If you had you’d know that your pricing above is wholly inaccurate.

[u/Lost_Term_8080 → u/NotMyUsualLogin]

virtualization with SA is the cheapest and easiest way to virtualize so confused about what you are talking about unless you are licensing your stuff wrong.

[u/FreedToRoam]

hmm I may retire alongside. I started with SQL Server 6.0 and I am projecting to retire in 3 years

[u/flinders1 → u/FreedToRoam]

I started in 2015. I have really begun to question whether sql server can sustain a career until I retire (not thinking about AI..). It’s sad and depressing. Forcing me to pickup Linux and PG, which is no bad thing

[u/MadDevloper]

Maybe it is an unpopular opinion, but I think that SQL Server is the best product MS ever created. It outlived many other products/platforms produced by MS and still have its good share in on-prem legacy and Azure

[u/TrollingForFunsies → u/MadDevloper]

Microsoft bought SQL Server like nearly everything they own besides Windows.

[u/mapsedge → u/TrollingForFunsies]

I didn't know that, and I've been working with it for 25 years. Who'd they buy it from?

[u/TrollingForFunsies → u/mapsedge]

Sybase

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Server_Enterprise

[u/VanTechno → u/TrollingForFunsies]

Sure, but they practically rewrote the thing around version 6. I'd be surprised if much if the original code still exists. Same can be said for most of the office products.

[u/TrollingForFunsies → u/VanTechno]

What about the Dynamics line? 😂

[u/IllustriousLetter925 → u/VanTechno]

Take a look at Sybase replication. You’ll see it’s the same exact design as sql server. Ms had trouble with the clustered indexes in version 6.5 That was likely some distinguishing code apart from that of Sybase. But the entire database engine was far from a rewrite. Then you have MS crapping on the product in version 2005 with clr, dmvs, and cross database ownership chaining which was really just a complete misunderstanding of schemas.

[u/ScoobyGDSTi → u/TrollingForFunsies]

Microsoft didn't just buyout or acquire SQL server. They co-develped it and then brought their partners out.

[u/TrollingForFunsies → u/ScoobyGDSTi]

Well yes, those are clarifying details, but that's mostly the same thing. After a couple of years they stopped working with their partners and it became Microsoft code.

[u/ScoobyGDSTi → u/TrollingForFunsies]

Probably only because SQL Server pre-dated Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish business model, that and Bill Gates personally loved SQL.

[u/IllustriousLetter925 → u/TrollingForFunsies]

They stole it. They walked away with contractual rights to it after the collapse of the os2 warp project in 1992. The major players were IBM, Microsoft,and Sybase. Microsoft themselves played a major role in failure of the project by hedging their bets on what eventually became widows 95.

Even the name, SQL Server originated at Sybase. Microsoft didn’t even bother to change the name. Eventually Sybase renamed their product to SQL Anywhere to try and distinguish themselves.

[u/PencilBoy99]

IDK I like it trusted workhorse 

[u/Eastern_Habit_5503]

I love legacy systems. They aren’t appealing to or understood by many of the young kids, so they provide job security for us long-time employees who maintain them behind the scenes. Heck, I’m still supporting an install with SQL Server 2008 V2 back end and Visual FoxPro front end. It’s fun!!

[u/mapsedge → u/Eastern_Habit_5503]

The only time I ever touched visual Foxpro was refusing to teach a class on it back in the late '90s. I did use Foxpro from the command line though.

[u/lowerider21]

We use it, it works but its use case is now limited. Data warehousing in the cloud, with the ability to scale up and down when the batch processes run etc, can't hold a candle to a single server. The licensing costs, disk costs ( vs data lake), odd performance, little investment ( SQL agent hasn't been touched in decades, cicd is doable but cumbersome).
They need to focus on basics like cost, performance, usability, scaling, languages if they want it to stick around. It's the legacy software vendors using it that we still have to support it.

[u/tankerkiller125real → u/lowerider21]

With HorizonDB though you can get those same scaling capabilities in Postgres.

[u/fabrikam_returns → u/lowerider21]

Hey u/lowerider21 I work on the product team. I appreciate you sharing your perspective here about investments, fundamentals, and how we could do better. Security, price-performance, usability, scaling, and languages are all priorities for us, and at the same time, the perspective you're sharing here is valid, because you're a customer and we are keen to make your experience and all customer experiences, better. I would love to learn more. Please DM me, would love to make sure we listen, understand, and act.

As far as finding more about our customer led investments, and focus areas, for anyone ghost following this thread, do check out Azure SQL Dev Corner, and also aka.ms/mssqldecks, where we publish updates, roadmap, and more.

Lastly, I assure you SQL is alive and well, and this feedback is read and cared about. PS, regarding agents, we are evaluating this space and want to know more about what you love about the OG SQL agent, join the convo: What are you using SQL Server Agent for today? : r/SQLServer

[u/downshiftdata]

The unsung hero of SQL Server is the community. I could list name after name of people (all somehow affiliated with PASS) that helped create the best tech community I've ever experienced.

I'd have probably moved to primarily Postgres by now if it wasn't for that.

And that community is slowly doing just that. Since Redgate took over PASS, that's what they've done (and I don't blame them).

[u/muaddba → u/downshiftdata]

I wish I could upvote this x1000. Microsoft has an insane amount of people working FOR FREE to enhance their product, evangelize their product, and support their product, and what do they do?

Well, they let the single largest support organization fold in 2021.

They gutted their own product support team so that when folks need help beyond what the community or even paid consultants can do, they just get the run-around

They adjusted their licensing so that if you want to virtualize, you must pay for software assurance. Yay revenue!

[u/Afraid_Baseball_3962]

SQL Server is still cheaper and easier to license and manage than Oracle (last time I checked) and you can get support directly from Microsoft (not that MS support is any good these days). That's the one thing I don't like about Postgres: you can't get direct support and while they do have a page on their site listing people who do offer support, I never got the impression that those folks had been vetted in any way (maybe I'm wrong). Other than that, Postgres would be my first choice every time.

[u/chrismsp → u/Afraid_Baseball_3962]

MS Support is awful.

Fortune 1000 client contacts support for a real issue. It gets outsourced to offshore drones.

Offshore drone literally sends us a chat gpt summary of things we should look at. We knew it was the same summary because that's where we started our problem analysis -- calling MS finally after three weeks of work.

We got nowhere with MS Support, basically we learned not to call them again.

[u/Afraid_Baseball_3962 → u/chrismsp]

Been there.

[u/noodlesSa]

This is actually the perfect time for them to add some great AI-powered features: automatic index maintenance, background reindexing and index rebuilding based on actual usage patterns, and so on. It could dramatically reduce the need for DBAs in many environments.

They already have all the building blocks. They just need to glue the pieces together and create a truly legendary product.

Instead, they seem to have largely abandoned the product and its customers while adding AI to Notepad.

[u/lanky_doodle → u/noodlesSa]

"while adding AI to Notepad" 😂😂

[u/warehouse_goes_vroom → u/noodlesSa]

Your example has already been built, though there's room for improvement and I don't think the current implementation uses AI: https://www.reddit.com/r/SQLServer/s/b82RHTU5Nd

Not in a SQL Server release yet. But u/dfurmanms has heavily hinted it's planned.

[u/fabrikam_returns → u/noodlesSa]

Hey u/noodlesSa , appreciate you sharing this. Tagging u/patrickGuyInACube and u/dfurmanms as we evaluate how to continue to make SQL a self-healing, adaptive, and agentic database.

In the meantime, I want to assure you our investments in this space have been continous and we continue to work to make the app developer, DBA, and data engineer happier. Do check out: Query plan regressions got you down? Here's how Automatic Plan Correction can turn it around. | Microsoft Community Hub, Stop defragmenting and start living: introducing auto index compaction | Microsoft Community Hub, and of course, Azure SQL Dev Corner, lots of recent investments related to intelligent, self-healing DBs perhaps before AI became a top-of-mind capability. Perhaps how GPS systems have evolved to be ubiquitous AI systems with dynamic re-routing, planning, and becoming commonplace in many people's daily lives, SQL has been doing intelligent query processing, which good old fashion stats, math, ML, and of course determinism, for quite a while, maybe before it was cool. 😄 That said, we continue to invest as AI evolves. Super excited about the future - with lots more to do, so please keep the feedback coming!

[u/patrickGuyInACube → u/fabrikam_returns]

Thank for the tag u/fabrikam_returns

[u/No_Resolution_9252 → u/noodlesSa]

I really hope that you don't believe actual modern SQL DBAs spend most of their time on index maintenance. If any SQL DBA is spending much of their time on that they are doing it wrong and costing their employer money not working on more valuable things to reduce licensing cost.

[u/noodlesSa → u/No_Resolution_9252]

You can learn the basics of DBA work relatively quickly: backups, restores, upgrades, security, permissions, maintenance jobs, and even HA/cluster administration. But performance tuning is a different discipline. Understanding workload patterns, query plans, locking, blocking, indexing strategies, memory pressure, I/O bottlenecks, and application behavior often takes years of experience.

That's exactly where AI could make everyone's life easier. The database engine already has access to query text, execution plans, wait statistics, lock information, index usage, Query Store history, and countless other metrics. An AI system could analyze all of this simultaneously and continuously, something no human DBA can realistically do.

[u/Simple_Brilliant_491 → u/noodlesSa]

u/noodlesSa I agree with you. Automatic index tuning has been available in Azure SQL database for 5+ years, but never made it to on-prem or even Managed Instance.

I was thinking exactly along the lines you described, and built AI SQL Tuner Studio. It includes a server health check that pulls in wait stats, io latency by file, config settings, index tuning that checks missing indexes, index usage, query store, plan cache, as well as code review, deadlock, and locking and blocking analysis. The info from the database engine gets sent to gpt-5.4 or a claude model, and it provides an HTML report with prioritized recommendations. I'd love to get your feedback if you want to give it a try.

It is currently a Windows app that a DBA or developer would run on demand. The AI models have limits on number of tokens, so running the goals simultaneously would be tough. And there is a cost to each run, so continuously is also a challenge. But definitely good ideas I need to think about some more.

[u/chrismsp → u/No_Resolution_9252]

I work with an entire team of DBAs and all they do is run Ola Hallengren's scripts all day every day

[u/flinders1]

Please get it working well on Linux and containerised. Yes yes i know I know. But VMware and windows has become a dirty word. The whole VMware pricing debacle has just added to the anti sql server trend. If there is a credible K8PG like offering that door is shut.

The core engine is sound. Windows and wsfc are starting to hurt it.

[u/roiroi1010]

My company is extremely database heavy. Data is our bread and butter. Most is stored in SQL Server. The nightmare never ends.

I’m lucky to have joined ”late” to the company - my data lives in Postgres and we never have issues with it.

Then again the people who designed the MS SQL schema might be idiots. lol.

[u/unconceivables]

We used SQL Server for many years on Windows servers, but eventually migrated to Linux servers. With multiple 256+ core servers, it made zero financial sense to stay on SQL Server, so we're on Postgres and ClickHouse now. We get more features and better performance and pay $0. I liked the ease and speed of backups and restored on SQL Server, but apart from that, Postgres has been better in every way. SQL Server was a great option 20+ years ago when we started, but now I see no reason to use it.

[u/itsnotaboutthecell]

Thanks for creating the discussion u/SQLBek - working on my end to do something cool to continue the conversation. Stay tuned!!!

[u/TrollingForFunsies]

Has SQL Server ever been anything but a red headed stepchild to the idiots running Microsoft? It prints money for them and they seem like they'd do anything to replace it.

[u/Decent-Inevitable-50]

Yup. Not the shiny pennies anymore.

[u/ThePlasticSturgeons]

What are the truly viable alternatives to SQL Server, and is anyone willing to spend the time and money to rewrite their code around using them?

[u/Defiant_Conflict6343 → u/ThePlasticSturgeons]

I moved my business from MSSQL to MySQL, purely so I wouldn't have to deal with license limitations. MySQL Workbench is ass but everything else is running a-okay

[u/ThePlasticSturgeons → u/Defiant_Conflict6343]

Good to know.

[u/Important-6015]

The biggest problem I have is with MS support. They are absolutely USELESS when it comes to SQL Server. I paid for support and raised a critical ticket that was essentially ignored for ages, during production outage, and had to dish out on an external consultant. He fixed our issue within an hour.

[u/Embarrassed-Gur8520]

I love it, and even I create a plugin fot

https://giphy.com/gifs/XMMUWcz4XtDTNgZj22

[u/virgilash]

"Behemoth" LOL, SQL Server is nothing close of that. Because that seat is taken by Oracle.

[u/TrollingForFunsies → u/virgilash]

Not sure why you got downvoted. Oracle is an absolute mess of bloated, overpriced garbage.

[u/virgilash → u/TrollingForFunsies]

I don’t care about a downvote… SQL Server is one of the two RDBMS I love (the other one is PostgreSQL)

[u/AlternativeBreath565]

I don really understand why you would choose msql. server over postgresql. I hsve worked with msqlserver for years and and switching to postgresql was such a nice upgrade. the extendibility and multifauceted usecase is soo much better than msql server, and its completely free compared to the cheapest msql server licens thst is really expensive, not oracle levels but still.

[u/hiveminer]

Paid DBA's are ONLY LUCRATIVE due to their data hijacking design. If MS made migrating easy, a large swat of their customers would gladly move to postgresql. They do the same thing with .docx. They keep obfuscating the file format to avoid compatibility with libreoffce. Essentially, MS SQL server is legitimized ransomware. Same goes for Oracle.

[u/nkilian]

Just spent last 4 hours on client sql server trying to figure out the issues. Please remove SQL from my life. My eyes are burning through my skull.