I'm a big fan of SQL Server but the main thing that hurts it is the cost. Licensing our two servers today would cost a quarter of a million dollars. The OS cost is a rounding error. If I'm paying that much money for SQL Server I don't think I'd choose the Linux version for at least another 5 years from now. It needs to prove itself and there's almost no benefit to offset the risk.

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Replication,_Clustering,_an...

It's my understanding that the Postgres team has decided to change their historical stance of considering clustering solutions outside the scope of the core project, but I'm unclear exactly how far that has come.

The variety of different 3rd party implementations in various states of maturity make this a bit tedious to sort through.

That said, I always pick PG for my personal projects. I just have a hard time getting sign-off on it from my corporate overlords for anything at work.

Async Multimaster is in the list of replication solutions.

I have not personally implemented it myself.

Edit, As I am reading this more closely it may be listing third party implementations and is not 'out of box'

> Are you talking more in terms of support?

Support is not tied to the product's license (which is common for proprietary software).

That's still significantly better than "noone but a single vendor can and you're at their mercy", but just being FLOSS doesn't mean it can't suffer from product lock-in, just that with the hurdle being complexity and not copyright.

Natural complexity, when the domain is simply complex to model, can't be gotten rid of regardless of the product.

If you overcame that and made a patch, but it's not accepted by the upstream - there are maintenance costs. How long would you be able to maintain your own fork of a large software project, keeping up with the upstream? I've tried with a few small ones (say, at a small ISP company, I just needed some custom pppd patches for in-house billing logic), and found it to be not a pleasant experience. I believe it's not just because I'm a lazy ass - I saw tons of forks on GitHub that were slowly rotting away, maintained for some time but eventually forsaken by their authors and far behind their upstreams.

> If you overcame that and made a patch, but it's not accepted by the upstream

As for how well the FLOSS projects are managed, how's your luck at debugging let alone getting a patch accepted in MS-SQL, for instance?

> I saw tons of forks on GitHub that were slowly rotting away

I saw people with food, who weren't eating it because they were full, and I decided that food was stupid. Right?

> How long would you be able to maintain your own fork of a large software project, keeping up with the upstream?

Far longer than a binary patch... You know, to block a certain cipher suite or something in a closed-source product.

Duh, none or nearly none, of course.

I'm not saying that proprietary binary blobs are better. There are exceptions, but generally they're significantly worse in this regard.

I'm only saying that just because software is FLOSS doesn't mean one can successfully hack on it and adapt it to their needs, or easily migrate to other FLOSS solutions. Sometimes, they'll be stuck for a while - I think that's also can be considered as a lock-in.

> Nobody made their code complex because they felt like it.

Maybe. But there's a term "over-engineering" too. It's not that someone decides to make things unnecessarily complex, but sometimes they really do.

It will significantly reduce the licensing implications of using SQL Server for a small project. I know people who use MSSQL in their day job but postgres/other for personal projects and one of the reasons is needing to license Windows if a personal project becomes public and needs hosting. This way a small project can use SQL Server Express on Linux just as cost free as progres (or mysql if you must) on Linux.

The choice of OS will no longer dictates the choice of DB, that decision can be entirely made on the needs of the project and its target users.

Small projects using Express edition may grow into larger ones needed standard/enterprise features, and people exposed to SQL Server through projects using it on Linux are less likely to dismiss ti later because the know postgres/other only. I'm not sure how much we'll see brand new larger projects use SQL Server on Linux any time soon though, but I imagine "get them in at the ground floor and create familiarity as early as possible" is the intention here much like cheap educational licensing for Windows, Office, & full VS and the availability of VS Express.

That said, I use MS SQL both at work and on my personal projects thanks to BizSpark.

There's also Azure, which, to be fair, is still more expensive than an equivalent AWS stack with Postgre or something.

Conversations I had with some senior SQL server team members in the last two years suggested they were ready for no reboot patching but were limited by the OS and felt it was holding them back. If it wasn't for Windows, SQL server uptime would be much better (was the implication)

I'm looking forward to trialing it.

And if you are a start-up, you will upgrade your DB, in which case you might only get a few years free anyway.

Well, I might KEEP my SQL Server, but switch from Windows to Linux as the host OS - to save $$ on licensing and hardware.

(I actually remember using Sybase SQL server for a while until the tool that would eventually be called Enterprise Manager was released.)

It's naive to support it just because of the assumption that more choice must be good.

On the contrary the past few years on Windows have been full of data corruption bugs in SQL 2012 and 2014; and while 2016 looks amazing with new features Microsoft has continued to push ahead instead of just - you know - fixing the fucking bugs we all keep reporting and upvoting on Connect and getting ignored.

More choice is IMHO not a good thing. It's a bad thing. In the same way people who "multi task" are more often than not churning out shit work and running on luck - I'd prefer Microsoft focus on what they know best.

There are a few obvious cases which don't work (e.g. scalar UDFs aren't inlined - always use table UDFs), but the performance battle Oracle and Microsoft had circa 2000 really shows. The vast majority of the time you can code your intent and the query optimizer will simply do the right thing.

The main reason I would choose SQL over any of the competition is DataDude/VSSQL. We started using it where I work (~5100 schema objects) and it's revolutionary. T-SQL becomes a first-class language in Visual Studio:

- Full editor integration: intellisense and errors as you type.

- Build system: build (including static analysis) and deploy from Visual Studio. MSBuild-based integration for CI.

- Schema delta: you write/update your schema as though you are writing it for the first time and, as part of the build, the ALTER script will be generated for you. You rarely have to write migration scripts yourself (I've only had to when migrating data across columns/tables).

I have been thinking about solving this for PostgreSQL because I'm now completely unable to work without it - I just wish I had the time. Any other form of SQL development now feels like VBScript development in Notepad.

Update: Seems like this has become SQL Server Data Tools (but not the BI tools of the same name?). I'll have to look into this more.

You can also get it to reverse-engineer an existing database into a project[2].

Getting it to work for CI isn't turn-key. When you build a SQL/DB project it results in both a CREATE/ALTER script (depending on whether you do a diff build or a CREATE build) as well as a schema file (.dbschema). You need to track previous versions of the dbschema yourself (we use branching to track this file across releases), so that it can it has the base for diffing during the build.

It's a good idea to add a database reference to [sys] and [master] in all your projects (which is not done by default).

Knowing the right keywords I Googled a bit for you:

[1]: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/01/01/visual-...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWKllVyozOg (talks about SQLAzure, but these tools do work on-premise)

[3]: http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/998465/Creating-a-SQL-Server...

[4]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ssdt/2014/07/24/sql-server-... (if you use TFS CI, otherwise you can invoke MSBUILD directly from whatever CI you use)

MS SQL is missing some very basic SQL functionality.

Microsoft rewrote the code so there was no more Sybase code, but it still followed Transact SQL standards. T-SQL is not as complete as PL/SQL and others. It is just that Microsoft is that 800 pound gorilla so people use their products.

My last job I did migration from Excel and MS-Access to SQL Server using VB 6.0 code and ADO recordsets to copy and sync up data. They key was to use a column named date modified that had a time stamp when it was last modified to figure out which record was the newest and back up the old record to a history table in case it needed to be reverted later on.

I suppose Microsoft is pretty popular in beetween those 2 markets.

I work with both on a daily basis and there is a mile of difference. Yes I can accomplish whatever I want in sql server but there are so many small things that could improve.

Some of other pet peevees are: You can't use a lot of left joins, it slows down the query dramatically. If there is only one to one relation, use subselects instead.

Thou shall not do queries like this: select foo into baz from bar where fooid not in (select fooid from bar) They are the death of the engine.

And many "unwritten rules" like that.

Postgres just accepts the queries and run them..

We are on SQL server 2014. I have had a query go from 2-3 hours down to 7 minutes by replacing left joins with subselects within the query for instance (and yes all the indices are in place as recommended by sql server query planer)

The one with a insert based on a query on the same table I have never managed to run at all and I have to use a temporary table as an intermediary instead.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/psssql/2010/09/01/slow-quer...

Microsoft doesn't need to make SQL Server look like MySQL. Quite the other way around.

And it's very useful in a ton of situations which is why so many other SQL dialects have added it. It's not like SQL Server is completely standards compliant so I'd rather have the functionality then have to use MERGE because it's "standard".

It sounds like you are talking about the XML conversion method for concatenating groups. There is one other way around it using custom .NET CLR functions, but it is definitely cumbersome as well.

I've read that SQL Server code was originally based on Sybase code they licensed. Not sure.

Sybase is not in anyway related to Ingres that I know of other than the fact that Bob Epstein and Mike Stonebraker worked on the Ingres project at Cal. Sybase in fact was considerably different from Ingres in many ways such as use of SQL instead of QUEL, network access to the SQL Server, and specialized features like stored procedures. The Sybase founders did not come directly from Cal or even Ingres but rather from Britton Lee.

Can you store / query JSON-like data in SQL server? I'd like to be able to store a structured object and query a keypath.

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2012/04/27/sql-server-introduct...

This is unfortunate as I'd love to have better document-db style functionality in SQL Server.

I've built a Rails app atop a large legacy SQL Server, and I really haven't run into anything that wouldn't run. (aside from `rails db`)

We don't really care that much about the OS -- never did, never will. A windows license is very cheap, and we only need maybe 20 windows licenses to run the whole network.

The much bigger cost are SQL Server licenses, for which we care very much about!

All in all we'll keep on using SQL, but on the most performant platform -- my bet is that it's going to be Windows for a while though.

Regarding .Net Core: the platform is not ready yet (e.g. lack of support for Security IIRC), but we'll adopt it when it is -- again on the fastest platform.

Both in the case of SQL Server and .Net core, we are working publicly on GitHub with Microsoft by testing and providing advice where needed to make sure the next version of our ecosystem is the best possible.

Or was the RDS implementation part of how MS figured out how to release this??

The big difference with RDS is that you don't get the full gambit of clustering capabilities that SQL server supports. This is mainly due to the fact they don't have a shared storage model that SQL cluster failover requires.

If you aren't locked into their eco-system stay clear away from it. Otherwise you will regret it, as the licensing costs are very expensive and per CPU core (think Oracle). Better switch to MySQL or Postgres or Lucene, etc.

For example, OLAP, distributed transactions, cluster scalability and so on.