Microsoft SQL Server

SQL does not run on Snapdragon or any ARM processors in general. Vendors like Dell are starting to sell laptops with ARM-based processors, and while Windows will work, SQL refuses to run.

When Windows 11 came out, SQL would fail after the upgrade from 10 to 11 because Windows 11 formatted the disk with larger sector sizes than SQL allows. This left a lot of our customers unable to use our software until they reverted to Windows 10. Since then, a registry hack has been made available to let SQL run, but we lost quite a bit of customer goodwill. Microsoft needs to test its software, Windows, and SQL on various platforms before pushing upgrades to avoid this.

Since 2008, the maximum database size available to SQL Express has been 10 gigabytes. However, 10 gigs does not go nearly as far now as it did then, and this needs to be doubled.

Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition has a high cost but is the only edition which supports SQL Always On Availability Groups. It would be nice to include this feature in the Standard version.

Licensing of Microsoft SQL Server is a quite complex matter, it would be good to simplify licensing in the future. For example, per core vs per user CAL licensing, as well as complex licensing scenarios in the Cloud and on Edge locations.

It would be good to include native tools for converting Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB databases (schema and data) for import into Microsoft SQL Server.

Query interface

Management interface

Logging

The query optimizer is clunky

Performance tuning is difficult to use

It's expensive

Database backup and recovery functionality need improvement. Sometimes I have observed that when you try to restore a backup to a previous date/state, it does not work as expected, and restore fails.

Cost gets higher on integrating with Azure SQL