Take a look at the "Most Loved" and the "Most Dreaded" databases here:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-d...

It's pretty clear that MSSQL is seen rather differently from DB2 and Oracle (which are #1 and #2 on the "most dreaded" list, respectively).

Yeah but... at the risk of sounding like a dick... is stack overflow the best place to guage opinion on such things? I mean we’re essentially asking the people who post questions like “why is my HTML table not look right?” To posit an opinion on what they consider best of class in a whole bunch of categories that they’re probably novices at.

I think it’s pretty clear that the people with the best opinions on SO are vastly outnumbered by people with unqualified opinions. Surely something like Simpson’s law can be applied here. Like - of the people with n amount of accepted answers for any given tag - what is their opinion on something related to that tag?

The people who ask why HTML table is not looking right are unlikely to express a strong opinion on Oracle etc either way.

Are you sure? I suspect that they’re the people most likely to participate in those polls.

I personally can’t be bothered with these kinds of questions, but I remember that back in my early days, I was something of a zealot when it came to things I knew vs things I didn’t. I cut my teeth on PHP, MySQL and Flash/Actionscript. Had you asked me back then how I rated those things, I’d have given them 10/10, despite having nothing to compare them to.

Look at the description of the that the poll asked:

"% of developers who are developing with the language or technology but have not expressed interest in continuing to do so"

I think DB2 depends entirely on what platform you use it on.

sure sql studio that has the same problems like the last time i used it 10 yeaars ago, lol microsoft you cannot refresh the side view after i make changes, so i have to hit refresh constantly.