Microsoft SQL Server Reviews & Product Details

Solid and reliable. Still the standard for mid-size businesses, particularly those who run other Microsoft servers and are looking for easy tie-ins to existing AD infrastructure. Express edition lets you run databases up to 10GB in size for free; easy to unlock higher editions when you outgrow that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

More than any other Microsoft product, SQL requires you to be very careful during initial setup and configuration, lest you find yourself with a borked installation or even locked out of it altogether. Also, if you want to license the box instead of going the Server + CAL route, the licensing has changed from per processor to per core with SQL 2012. The price of 4 cores is roughly equal to the old per processor cost, so processors with higher core counts are significantly more expensive to license than in the past. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the overall breadth of the product offering. Not only do you get a world class data engine, you also get a ETL system, a reporting system and an analytics engine. Microsoft has made it very easy to set up, use and support. The built in mechanisms for fault tolerance and availability are pretty extensive when properly deployed. SQL Server offers some distinct advantages when coupled with a .Net development environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SQL Server can scale up to very large data loads and there are very few situations where I see that, when properly set up, it is under powered. SQL Server has come a very long way in this regard over the years. This having been said, other platforms seem to be designed with this in mind. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Compared with Oracle and Sybase, SQL Server has many more documented functions and a much easier and faster time to market. It is now built to work well with the .NET CLR types and works well with C++/C# as a result. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some fields have precision problems - i.e. DATETIME is limited to precision of 3 1/3 milliseconds. Misses the *= operator. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The SQL Server management tool is terrific. The T-SQL language is very powerful and allows you to script a lot of complicated data management procedures. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish it had a query builder as good as Access. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scheduled backups. Excellent User Interface (via Management Studio). Speed. Giving permissions to users and the ability link to Active Directory. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Seems very resource hungry at times. But if you run it on a dedicated server, you don't really notice it as much. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's very popular and provides a very good reliability for your web applications. It provides a good security for application on the web. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It needs some training to use it and it is not light on servers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

MS Sql used to be only seen for the mid market. If you were a big player you needed oracle or DB2.

Now It can handle a lot. Also its simpler that Oracle. so you dont need an army to support it Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Can get very resource hungry. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Many Microsoft houses (as in ERP etc) will use this as standard. Its a good Database system. Fairly easy to setup and configure, create backups etc. Fantastic reporting capability as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SQL Server need a lot of power to have a good response.

Fairly robust however, Oracle seems to be the choice of bigger players. SQL doesn't play well with other Databases in terms of data transfer etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SQL is a very solid back end database system--we use it with several different applications and are very pleased with the reliability and useability. The management tools are amazingly good for backups, scripting etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is a resource HOG! I know that database transactions are very real-time and therefore can be a hog, but compared to Progress and some of the other proprietary database systems I have used, SQL seems to take the cake. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It has a new logo. Is that something nice? Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When you work with multiple database system you start to find that MS SQL is lacking a lot of standard things like limiters which you have to build procedures for. Also the server is a resource hog and has to be watched for any errors that may happen and stop it from running correctly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.