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Excellent tool for enterprise data management
Updated September 17, 2020

Excellent tool for enterprise data management

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft SQL Server

My department uses SQL Server (and Azure Data Studio, increasingly, but still primarily SQL Server) for database management and analysis. Other departments use it as well, including our QA team, to verify the expected output of data manipulation or the functionality of changes to the code base. It's a pretty standard tool at this point.
  • Query analysis and execution plan details - You can see indexes you may be missing that would (if used) possibly improve performance of your stored procedures and queries.
  • Data storage - It's easy to restore and back up entire databases and to set up automatic jobs to do this.
  • Scheduled tasks - You can plan health checks or updates to data, or reports, from the Jobs tool.
  • Unlike Visual Studio, there isn't a built-in or out-of-the-box way to format your SQL scripts/queries. You can easily install plugins and extensions to do this (paid or free) but it would be a nice-to-have.
  • Occasionally it's not obvious from a query execution plan what piece is causing the most bottleneck, and even then, side-effects of implementing the suggested index(es) aren't always obvious.
  • We write code with a better idea of the possible performance hits in our database.
  • Because many software developers use SQL Server, there's seldom much time spent on on-boarding new team members for this tool.
For our enterprise software, SQL Server has more predictable functionality and tools than the other products we've examined. If we have a question or a problem, it's quite likely someone else has had to deal with the same thing, and it's possible to find help or tips online without spending much time doing it. SQL Server also plays pretty nicely with C#/Visual Studio projects, too, so integration is pretty seamless.
Whatever the question is that we may have about how to accomplish something, it's not been difficult to find answers in the typical online forums (Stack Overflow, etc). The documentation from Microsoft is pretty thorough, too, and easy to follow. I've had no problems with support for SQL Server, which is not always the case with other products.

Do you think Microsoft SQL Server delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft SQL Server's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft SQL Server live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft SQL Server go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft SQL Server again?

Yes

If you're a developer and you do any work with retrieving or updating data, Microsoft SQL Server is a great choice (assuming you're working on a Windows machine - although I think it's easier now than it used to be to connect to SQL Server from other operating systems). It's fairly straightforward and the learning curve isn't terribly steep, and if you put the time and effort in you can learn a lot about performance tuning and best practices.