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Easy to use and set up, robust and reliable DBMS
January 20, 2020

Easy to use and set up, robust and reliable DBMS

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

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft SQL Server

In our database department, we use Microsoft SQL Server for storing data, data aggregation, and manipulation. We use Reporting services tools for creating, managing and deploying reports for our clients. For creating a report definition I personally used Report Builder which makes defining data source connections, queries used to retrieve data, expressions, parameters and others extremely easy to perform. We also try to improve the performance of stored procedures, user-defined functions, and triggers by learning the execution plan in detail. One of our clients has a web app for an insurance company and they have a large amount of data stored in the Microsoft SQL Server database. Our goal is to improve performance from queries that are used in that web app, so we try controlling execution plans with hints or adding indexes. In cases when we meet a new client who already has some database storage then we use replication technology for copying and distributing data and objects from one database to another. Besides that, we also help our clients to build parameterized queries in order to defend from SQL injection which is one of the most common web hacking techniques.
  • It offers a lot of functionalities, such as Reporting Services, Integration Services, Job Scheduler, Resource Manager, Query Analyzer and Profiler, etc.
  • You can connect it to Active Directory if you so desire.
  • The price of the enterprise version could be a little lower and also licensing should be more understandable.
  • There can be problems when connecting with software that is not owned by Microsoft.
  • We have established cooperation with one insurance company which brought us a good profit.
  • Reports which we make for some powerful companies are simple and fast to perform and we earned from them.
We used MySQL for some smaller projects because this RDBMS works better with a small amount of data and a lot of young workers, especially students, can handle MySQL very well because they learned it at the university. One important thing to keep in mind is that MySQL is completely free and very easy to set up. For some basic queries and beginner websites, it is indeed the best solution. We also, for a short period of time, used DB2 database for developing Java web applications. It is a product from IBM and it has support for XML structures. It has its use but I would say that Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are the two best choices.
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.

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

When a client is working in a .NET environment and he is developing a web application then it is advisable to use Microsoft SQL Server as a storage solution. Also when some company wants to store a large amount of data then Microsoft SQL Server is an extremely good solution because it is a very stable and maintainable database option. But in cases when someone wants to make a small website or application that stores a small amount of data then it is probably better to store it in some open-source database which is also free to use. When some company relies a lot on analytics then SQL Server is the first-class solution. A scenario where it would be less appropriate is when some startup doesn't have much money for starting and at the start they don't need some very professional RDBMS, then they could use something like MySQL.