Microsoft SQL Server

Fast and efficient compression on backups. Typically we see about a 65% reduction in size compared to the data file.

It just "works". We say this very little in IT but it really does just work. Almost every enterprise application out there works with it and the downtime is very minimal.

You have the opportunity to cluster servers. You can easily create a cluster of SQL servers to share resources instead of buying all new equipment and scattering the database footprint.

The patching has sometimes been an issue for us. It either doesn't work or the process isn't explained well for the different SQL instances on one engine.

I wish they would design a way to allow SQL backups to go somewhere other than a local drive. A UNC path would be best. This would allow us to rotate off the backups to a longer term storage device.

It takes up a huge amount of memory and space on a server.

There is no benefit to running it in VMWare. We typically find that servers run better in VMWare for our use cases but SQL seems to run just the same and you don't save on licensing so there really is no benefit.

Scalability... Period.

Robustness, From Backup/Recovery to integration, to reporting to data warehousing, this product does it all.

Very little maintenance is required to keep SQL Server running efficiently in our environment.

I would like to see more flexibility with Virtual Environment licensing. You must purchase a 4 core license to virtualize.

Cost for enterprise is a bit on the high side.

Would like to see an easy to use interface for establishing a cluster.

Access Data

Perform lage scale calculations

Control data flows

Visualisations

Improve dashboard capabilities

Sampling

It's stable and reliable - a mature product and known industry leader.

Easy integration across a number of applications.

Includes a number of powerful and easy to use tools as part of the entire product offering.

Requires a large "footprint" when installed in order to be best utilized. It would be nice if the overall size of it brought down.

High price tag. This could turn some organizations away in favor of free open source back end tools.

Performance tuning can be difficult, especially if you are non-dba type.

It's very easy to automate the install so we have a website set up where an application team can go and within a few mouse clicks, they've requested a new VM with SQL Server installed on it. The VM itself can take a day or two to deployment because it's not fully automated yet, but SQL Server is automatically installed within an hour or two.

All the different wizards within SQL Server Management Studio make it relatively easy for non DBAs to perform many tasks, thus making self-service possible in many instances.

The Always On Availability Group feature makes both High Availability and Disaster Recovery much easier to plan and implement, especially with SQL Server 2014's multiple secondaries.

The Database Tuning Advisor can also help relative novices tune their queries for better performance, though it can still recommend way too many indexes be created.

SQL Server needs something to compare/compete with Oracle's RAC. When is that coming, Microsoft?

I don't care for the evolution of its pricing model. SQL Server used to be a no-brainer when compared to other products on price but that's not the case anymore.

Great performance

Very easy to manage even for non-experienced users

MS SQL LocalDB is great if you're developer as it's very easy to use and it's free

Intellisense in management studio would be great improvement

Better GUI for LocalDB and SQL Express management

High end databases.

Performance databases.

Reporting services.

Ease of permissions administration.

Cost is too high.

Licensing is difficult to understand and is always changing.

Easy to clone servers and set up local dummy servers

Easy to back up all information and write tables with all the data as a script

Very flexible in exporting data from a wide range of files

Add more files that can be exported into SQL

Allow for more than one local server to be able to be set up

Management of very large volumes of data such as bulk loading

Is one of the best (if not the best) relational database

It brings you great ETL tools and data warehousing such as SSIS and SSAS

Data indexing

The management of VLDB (Very Large Databases) requires a lot of maintenance and preventive work to avoid falling into uncomfortable issues.

The introduction of In-Memory (sql 2014) has opened up new prospects but still has many limitations (data types, functions and various restrictions)

Table partitioning is as useful as awkward to handle.

SQL Server Management Studio provides an excellent UI for developing in SQL

SQL Server integrates well into the other business intelligence components of the Microsoft suite (e.g. SSRS, Integration Services, PowerPivot, etc.)

My main issues with SQL were related to limitations in programability. For instance, it was once cumbersome to build things like running totals. However, recent releases (e.g. SQL 2012) have addressed some of these limitations

The relational database management system is easy to use in designing database objects, including primary and foreign keys, constraints, default values, triggers, etc.

Microsoft SQL Server is great at processing sets of data.

Microsoft SQL Server's transactional structured query language (T-SQL) is very easy to use for ad-hoc queries as well as for designed database programs for database and application maintenance, operations and reporting.

The cost of Microsoft SQL Server is often not feasible for smaller businesses.

I'd like to see source control integrated into SQL Server, so that all changes to the database objects are automatically versioned and stored for reference or retrieval.

Handle large amounts of data. SQL can process thousands of rows of data in a pinch when given the correct hardware to utilize. SQL likes memory and it will utilize it very efficiently when given the chance.

SQL provides at least 2 methods to do everything. You can write simple SQL query scripts or you can use the built-in GUI (which coincidentally just runs SQL scripts behind the scenes).

Allows for jobs to be setup that can do simple tasks such as database backups, database restores, export and import data and even send out notifications when SQL Server encounters a problem.

Integrates with a lot of other programs and software. Microsoft allows SQL Server to integrate with Visual Studio and you can utilize SQL tools with SSIS, SSMS, SSAS, and SSRS to get deep into integration tools, Analyzing data, and reporting on various data in each database. You can also integrate with third party tools such as the suite of products from RedGate.

Speed up installation times. A manual installation of SQL server can take up a good chunk of time. You can be forced to go through an installation wizard screen by screen and it can take a lot of time waiting for each screen to load.

Allow for easier integration with GUI's. SQL has the capability to use a visual query builder where you can drag and drop fields, tables, etc to build a query but it is not as user friendly as you would imagine.

Make the permissions more stream lined. Users can have permissions to a SQL Server but not a particular database and trying to find the right spot to add the correct permissions can be painful for someone who is new to SQL Admin work.

Best out-of-the-box tools among enterprise scale DBMSs. SQL Management Studio is one of the best tools for almost all day-to-day tasks including deployment and support. In conjunction with other standard MS SQL Server tools it outperforms most other DBMSs I ever saw, including but not limiting Oracle and DB2.

Very powerful T-SQL.

Lots of data migration tools for easy integration with other data sources.

Great stability.

Native support by Visual Studio including database projects. You can deploy database updates even to production environment with literally 2-3 clicks. You may also generate diff script for manual analysis and deployment.

Price may seem tough.

Security model is a bit strange to get started but once you know a few particularities then nothing stops you from day-to-day tasks.

Sql Server Integration services is a a great tool for ETL needs

SQL Server Analysis Services is a great tool to build data marts and data cubes.

SQL Server Reporting Services is a great reporting tool.

SQL server installation always takes long time, that can be definitely improved.

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

Few in SSIS Realtime data refresh in SSRS More datasources in Power BI

Good query optimizer. For complex a query it provides helpful tools like Query Tuning Advisor.

Reliable database engine.

Many options for replications.

Good additional out-of-box features like Integration services, Analysis services and Reporting services.

No integration with source control like Microsoft TFS.

Intellisense can be improved further.

SQL Server is first a relational management engine. It stores and manages relational data extremely well.

SQL Server is highly scalable. With correctly designed databases and well-tuned queries, we're able to store and retrieve data at almost any scale.

SQL Server is highly ubiquitous. Almost every development tool and language can be used to build software with it. Almost any reporting tool can be used to retrieve information from it.

Deployments of changes to existing databases can be challenging. Better support within the tool for language constructs in assistance of deployments would be helpful.

Development processes such as using source control to build your databases is not a native part of the tool set.

Query tuning is difficult for those who don't have specialized knowledge.

Advanced data transformation and ETL techniques with SSIS.

Great platform for enterprise reporting with SSRS. You don't have to license each user like some other reporting software.

Reliable DBMS engine with advanced options for replication, data recovery, change tracking, maintenance.

Future support of Big Data and Predictive Analytics which matters for companies who want to get most value of its data.

Easy to support and maintain with built-in maintenance plans and wizards.

Extremely well documented.

Sometimes needs CU to make things work right.

Not all the features have meaningful error messages which forces the database administrator (DBA) to search the web on how to resolve such issue.

Administration is fairly easy. A SQL Server can be setup quickly and run without much management from a DBA. Some work is needed to configure the instances, but the platform tends to run very smoothly for us. Backups, index maintenance, and security are smooth and easy to set up, and with the GUI, we can make adjustments quickly, while still saving the underlying code.

Development is very easy for our staff of .NET professionals. The integration between .NET in Visual Studio and SQL Server means that there is little time spent working out how to build an application and we can focus on adding business value. Our work with Oracle and MySQL has required a bit more effort to understand the APIs.

Reliable. We use all versions of SQL Server, and we find that they are very stable. The systems backing SQLServerCentral, for example, are rebooted about once a year, usually to apply some security patches from Microsoft. We tend to stick to Service Packs as a means of updating our systems

Value. We receive a good amount of value for our use of SQL Server for the price we pay. We might pay less in initial costs for MySQL, but time loss, support costs to understand how the system works, and potential administrative issues may overwhelm that. It's a hard choice to make, but we do find our SQL Server costs to be reasonable.

One of the weaknesses of SQL Server is the lack of tooling in places. That sounds strange as Microsoft has been known for easy to use GUI tools, but a number of features in the last 4-5 versions of SQL Server (Service Broken, replication, Extended Events, and more) haven't received much help in the tooling areas.

Scalability. While SQL Server scales up nicely, and new hardware platforms have dramatically increased the power of a single instance, there are still issues with larger scale applications built on SQL Server that might require more than one instance. Or that could benefit from additional hardware machines of the same size. SQL Server hasn't scaled out well across machines.

Licensing. While SQL Server is reasonably priced (to me), it is still expensive as cores grow and there are limits to the small scales of some applications. The complexity of licensing also means that it becomes complex to manage this across time, as well as more expensive than I would like.

Tuning. While there are a wealth of ways to tune systems, it feels more complex inside of SQL Server at times than it needs to be, especially for less experienced users. The platform should do more to help users understand where issues occur and give them guidance. I think the SQL Server 2016 Query Store will help here.

Maturity of some features. I think that some of the features have been a bit neglected, apart from tooling, in the last few versions. It seems like Spatial data, the Availability Groups, Service Broker, and more haven't gotten enough work to mature them to be more useful and helpful features.

Quick backing up and restoring of databases. Particularly useful when testing.

I find triggers useful to keep the integrity of business logic.

Tools that come with it.

Easy installation process and setting up new databases.

Managing user roles and security could be clearer.

Cost of the Enterprise version.

Integrates well with very nearly all the platforms we use

Natively supported by .NET, our typical environment of choice

Large community to ask questions of

Less advanced users can get into trouble easily

Big learning curve for people starting off

Installing and administering a SQL Server instance is one key area that I've found very compelling when using this solution. If you are a power user, you can do many administration tasks via the command line. The visual tools are very good as well.

Development on the SQL Server platform is another area that I have found to be extremely flexible, powerful, and easy to manage code. It also integrates nicely with source control so you can keep track of changes.

Performance - While this is a debatable topic, it has performed really well with the type of business applications that we've developed in-house as well as packaged solutions (ERP, etc.). I especially like how you can partition data across multiple drives to increase performance even more. The key idea (as with any solution) is how it is architected within your environment to best suit your requirements.

One area that I'd like to see improve is it's monitoring toolset. While the built-in tools are good, I've found better 3rd party solutions that do a better job in this area (Embarcadero in particular).

Another area is backups. The out-of-box solution is good for small-to-medium sized databases. When your data gets large (gigabtyte/terabyte), then being able to have a robust backup solution with compression becomes critical.

Needs better out-of-box analytics and reporting tools. Again, the tools included in the SQL server package are good, but I find that we have to do a lot of workarounds to get these to work the way we need them to. However, for the most part, Reporting Services and Analysis Services are good toolset to quickly produce reports that would otherwise be too cumbersome with other tools on the market.

Integration Services is ok for the most part, but it lacks that Enterprise class level of robustness of an effective ETL tool.