Microsoft SQL Server Reviews & Product Details

Microsoft SQL Server is a "brand" that you will see almost everywhere. Its products has matured over the years, yet can feel familiar if you used other open source entries that offer the same stuff.

There is a lot of documentation and support for any of your SQL needs online. With the help of a big community and listening to its needs, it thrived to create a well balanced tool for all your administrative, storage, and analytic needs. A lot of the stuff you had to before as manual work in Microsoft SQL Server 5 years ago can be done now very simply these days with a simple command/functions/tools/etc.

Another important facet of this tool is that it comes bundled with other goodies, such as SSRS (SQL Service Reporting Services), which I heavily used a lot. In addition, each new iteration of the product, they add new features, to make your work be more productive. For these reasons, there is a lot of space in the variety and improvements you can do on your back end every day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The licensing costs is what makes it not worth it. You can almost get the same features, with a little more effort, by using free open source or low cost back end tools. To name a few, there is "tableau" for reporting, "Postgresql" for fast data storage and retrieval, Amazon Redshift and Google Big Query for analytics. Compared to Microsoft, these tools I named have more customization and flexibility on implementing complicated features and the ability to handle your needs when you need to scale up. Microsoft does indeed have alternative solutions that provide the same stuff. However, it is not very intuitive or in par and has not spread these tools widely to the community as much as they did for Microsoft SQL Server in the past. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Performance,Easy to use,Good UI .All Information is available deeply. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is some bug and they have not improve ssrs feature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One thing i like about SQL server is the performance it provides. The ability to join tables in our data warehouse in a star schema performs really well. New with 2014 is the OLTP in memory features that tremendous boost performance. Also very useful is the column store indexes, this works really well for a datawarehouse for a boost in performance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A disadvantage of SQL server would be compatibility and support with other applications. Applications must support the latest or your current platform or it would be incompatible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The simplicity of use, coupled with excellent and growing documentation. This, coupled with a wealth of community blogs, articles and forums make it an easy product to work with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

New features tend to be seen as focussed around outlier use-case scenarios, meaning it's easy for developers to leave code running against older versions of the product rather than upgrading to make use of newer performance improving features and best-practices. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

really easy to use and import/export large amounts of data, which saves so much time Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

its unfortunately becoming more costly to use, so may need to discontinue use in the future Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the flexibility that it provides and the numerous integrations with other tools. SQL is a first class citizen with all of Microsoft's products such as Visual Studio, etc. This makes development and monitoring pretty easy. That being said, there are products that serve the needs of big data much better now. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike that it typically takes a small fleet of database administrators to keep up with this product not to mention the numerous potential design gotchas. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's easy to create very advanced data models. The data cubes that you can create with SSIS are by far the easiest and best feature to glean info from the tables. The addition of TSQL run environment made things a ton easier. And the PowerView is awesome as well! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

TSQL engine is slooooow. Compared to a lot of open source SQL engines it is under-performant. DQS also sucks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SSRS - Business Intelligence Studio has been great for reporting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Interface sometimes can be difficult to navigate until you get the hang of it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SSIS can be used to perform a broad range of data migration tasks. The SSIS packages can easily be mainted using visual development tool based on Microsoft Visual Studio called the SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio. Its easy ability to drag and drop feature is quite useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is tightly coupled with SQL server so it cannot be purchased standalone. Migrating SSIS packages can be a nightmare.SSIS Tooling with SQL Server 2012 and above can be a pain to find. It is quite brittle and hard to debug Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ease and flexibility and the ability to use in a large environment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The way some jobs run and not all services compatible Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.