Likelihood to Recommend High-performance, high-concurrency transactions are well suited for ASE. ASE is lacking some features in my opinion such as history tables, however there are ways to implement them via workarounds or by using Replication Server. I do think the way the ASE parser and optimizer works are far superior to other products as it is a true cost-based optimizer and the order of the tables in the FROM clause does not really matter although a good SQL coder will place the tables in a meaningful order to make the SQL more readable. ASE is good for applications that require high availability and can be used for mission critical systems.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Microsoft SQL Server is a great RDBMS and meets all of our requirements. If you need a stable DB platform to support your line of a business application you'll be well served. Licensing costs are far cheaper, more portable and a lot more user friendly than Oracle. Product support and security patches from Microsoft are strong.
Read full review Pros Easy to setup and maintain Reliable, rarely has major hiccups requiring reboots or crashes Very responsive with complicated queries spanning various tablespaces and hundreds of millions of rows Read full review Easy to configure and use with Visual Studio and Dot Net Easy integration with MSBI to perform data analysis Data Security Easy to understand and use Very easy to export database and tables in the form of SQL query or a script Read full review Cons Full database encryption - need to utilize external keys vs internal - for better separation of duties. History Tables. Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review The import/export process can be tricky to follow with lots of steps and could be better for importing flat files Obtaining help from Microsoft is cumbersome and often other internet sources are better and quicker The documentation is not great and again it's generally better to obtain help elsewhere if needed Read full review Likelihood to Renew Our licenses are perpetual. It is the support that we will be renewing. We will renew because we continue to use and receive value from the product.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
Read full review Usability It does almost everything we need and for the things it doesn't do natively, we are still able to do using other features. For example, natively history tables weren't supported but we were able to create them using triggers.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Its does not have outages.
Read full review Performance SSAS data cubes may some time slow down your Excel reports.
Read full review Support Rating Incredibly responsive, saving us countless hours in troubleshooting.
Read full review We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
Read full review In-Person Training It was good
Read full review Online Training very hands on and detailed training
Read full review Implementation Rating Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Much less effort than Oracle. Much better customer support than Oracle. Roughly equivalent to SQL Server in performance and ease of use. Much better customer service than SQL Server. Different ballpark from IQ. Same customer service.
Read full review [Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used
MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Read full review Scalability SQL server does handle growing demands of a mid sized company.
Read full review Return on Investment Negative - Costs a lot ... but so do they all. Positive - It does what we need it to do. Read full review Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting. Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports. Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives. Read full review ScreenShots