Microsoft SQL Server
Ranked 3 of 22 databases by recommenders
Recommended as a batteries-included, hands-off database with strong tooling, documentation and a free Express edition. Main caveat is per-core licensing cost.
Recommended as a batteries-included, hands-off database with strong tooling, documentation and a free Express edition. Main caveat is per-core licensing cost.
132 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 73
- criticize it
- 59
- approval share
- 55%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 20 years
Median of the 6 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 73 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong GUI and IDE tooling
“SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in anger.”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email” “Good databases like Oracle and SQL Server have great IDEs for stored procedures development.”
Comment from 6 Jun 2026 in “pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution” “I found Oracle to just be a lot more unwieldy from a tooling perspective than SQL Server”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users” Good documentation and query hints
“even their documentation is absolutely stellar. You just read how the protocol works from the PDF and implement it.”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email” “it also has a hint to guide or disable sniffing because many times a generic plan is actually better”
Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations” “if it did not have plan hinting it would have been catastrophic for our customers”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “Waiting for Postgres 19: Better Planner Hints with Path Generation Strategies [video]” Easy, batteries-included, hands-off operation
“SQL Server, which is still the easiest, most batteries-included and hands-off database to this day.”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “Why don't more developers “use the platform”?” “still the easiest, most batteries-included and hands-off database to this day”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “Why don't more developers “use the platform”?” Trusted for serious, critical workloads
“I'd pick MSSQL if I was being compensated based upon the accuracy, performance, durability and availability of the system.”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres” “if it's serious business and we cant drop anything on the floor I am reaching for MSSQL without even blinking”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “Pragmatic Bitmap Filters in Microsoft SQL Server”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Per-core licensing cost is high
“I could never justify that license cost, and how it restricts how you design your infrastructure due to the cost and license terms.”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users” “SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way with their licensing shenanigans”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email” “they've been increasing the per-core licensing fees while simultaneously hardware core counts have been increasing exponentially”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “Pragmatic Bitmap Filters in Microsoft SQL Server” Deadlocks, timeouts and crashes under load
“MSSQL + VS + tested Server + tested Client on 16GB + Win11 will just choke MSSQL server into constant timeouts”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “Microsoft Is Quietly Deleting Mentions of 32 GB RAM Recommendation for Win 11” “SQLServer would deadlock between connections when all they were doing was executing the exact same statement”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers” “the MERGE statement is basically a bug minefield, I wouldn't use it unless I wanted to deadlock myself”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “Looking Ahead to Postgres 19” - Comment from 24 Nov 2025 in “We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs”
Late Unicode support in default collation
“MS could and should have seen it by then instead of waiting until 2019 to add utf8 collations to its database”
Comment from 7 Mar 2026 in “C# Strings Silently Kill Your SQL Server Indexes in Dapper” “The default collation on MS SQL Server didn’t support Unicode until some fairly recent releases.”
Comment from 16 Oct 2026 in “The 8-mile hole in a Hawaii national park that no one can explain”
Other databases people recommend
The four most recommended other databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PostgreSQL | 816 | 233 | 78% | 13 | 10 yrs42 owners | Approved |
| MySQL | 124 | 107 | 54% | 12 | — | — |
| Microsoft SQL ServerThis page | 73 | 59 | 55% | 12 | 20 yrs6 owners | — |
| Microsoft Access | 62 | 39 | 61% | 12 | — | — |
| Turso | 53 | 55 | 49% | 10 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 183 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“The default collation on MS SQL Server didn’t support Unicode until some fairly recent releases.”
“SQL Server, which is still the easiest, most batteries-included and hands-off database to this day.”
“still the easiest, most batteries-included and hands-off database to this day”
“Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 7, SQL Server, .Net, Office 2000, Office 2003 and Office 2007 were all excellent products”
“MsSQL had terms which prevented publishing benchmarks which compared it against other SQL DBs”
“We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy”
“for Microsoft shops that already run a lot of Windows and SQL Server it makes a lot of sense”
“MSSQL + VS + tested Server + tested Client on 16GB + Win11 will just choke MSSQL server into constant timeouts”
“That's why you won't see many serious comments bragging about the performance of SQL Server either.”
“MSSQL can handle 32k open connections no need to run a pooler in front of it”
“the MERGE statement is basically a bug minefield, I wouldn't use it unless I wanted to deadlock myself”
“MSSQL has DateTime2 and DateTimeOffset that map exactly into the CLR types.”
“I also miss clustered indexes, datetimeoffest, plan caching and query hints from MSSQL.”
“Pre-SQL Server 2000 it was garbage, but it's been improved significantly since then.”
“Good databases like Oracle and SQL Server have great IDEs for stored procedures development.”
“You can create an impenetrable prison for the LLM agents if you are willing to employ old school tech like Postgres, MSSQL or Oracle”
“Something like Postgres or SQL Server would be much more suitable for an OLAP data warehouse”
“Office, Windows and SQL server get some hate now and then but are nowhere near as buggy as Azure”
“MS-SQL was always really nice to get setup, but more recently has had a lot of difficulties”
“even their documentation is absolutely stellar. You just read how the protocol works from the PDF and implement it.”
“SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way with their licensing shenanigans”
“running clustered sql server 6.5 and 7 in 1998 for hundreds of concurrent users”
“SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in anger.”
“SQL Server 2000 was well received in the segments that mattered as a challenger”
“MS could and should have seen it by then instead of waiting until 2019 to add utf8 collations to its database”
“SQLServer would deadlock between connections when all they were doing was executing the exact same statement”
“they where actively trying to create something good back then. That might just be me only seeing the good parts, with .Net and SQLServer”
“if it did not have plan hinting it would have been catastrophic for our customers”
“having finance people with Excel really like being able to pull data directly from MSSQL”
“I'd pick MSSQL if I was being compensated based upon the accuracy, performance, durability and availability of the system.”
“I found Oracle to just be a lot more unwieldy from a tooling perspective than SQL Server”
“I could never justify that license cost, and how it restricts how you design your infrastructure due to the cost and license terms.”
“they've been increasing the per-core licensing fees while simultaneously hardware core counts have been increasing exponentially”
“if it's serious business and we cant drop anything on the floor I am reaching for MSSQL without even blinking”
“it also has a hint to guide or disable sniffing because many times a generic plan is actually better”
“In some ways. I'm also aware some SQL Server DBA's think that shipping log files around via SMB is an efficient form of SQL database replication.”
“the todays express version is more than enough to kickstart and grow a micro&small business”
“That's just not an issue with SQL Server or any similar standard client-server database engine.”
“would run into a heisenbug every few months that would crash our self hosted msql server cluster”
“with the ability to run SQL Server in Docker you can have the old stack right there on your Mac”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.