{"slug": "microsoft-sql-server", "name": "Microsoft SQL Server", "category": "databases", "category_name": "Databases", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 9, "warners": 3, "score": 0.954, "rising": 0.02, "first": "2026-01-09", "latest": "2026-10-24", "why": "we've been using a fairly basic mssql box for years in a organisation of about 300 and it humms along nicely", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 3, "compare": 0, "warn": 3}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "we've been using a fairly basic mssql box for years in a organisation of about 300 and it humms along nicely", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["SQL Server", "Microsoft SQL Server"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 803597008, "item_id": 50224813, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224813", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-10-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Now I can throw a T-SQL script at it in a few seconds to make it behave.", "excerpt": "I am the same way with MSSQL. I used to avoid it like the plague because of how the permissions/logins/everything worked. Now I can throw a T-SQL script at it in a few seconds to make it behave.", "context": "", "use_case": "database administration with agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twelve years of distributed SQLite"}, {"id": 784449857, "item_id": 49028116, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028116", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-07-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026:", "excerpt": "Microsoft is a big place. I recommend focusing on the parts they do well rather than getting tribal. All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026: Windows Server SQL Server .NET/C#/F#/Nuget Visual Studio [code] SSMS AAD/EntraID Defender DirectX Excel I agree that Teams still kind of sucks and that Azure is a complete dumpster fire of a cloud, on average. But that doesn't mean we should throw the p", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask: Why does everything Microsoft create lately feel fragile and half-baked?"}, {"id": 779752384, "item_id": 48734524, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734524", "by": "aljgz", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Indexed views are much faster than trying to achieve the same result with triggers.", "excerpt": "Indexed views are much faster than trying to achieve the same result with triggers. Triggers have serious concurrency limitations, and you do recalculations even when the fields you depend on are not touched. Indexed views are not much worse than indexes. Of course, when they refer to other tables there are underlying data lookups, but in our experience when we moved from triggers to indexed views, large scale data i", "context": "worked on a large-scale sales program", "use_case": "indexed views for sales stock", "switched_from": "", "story": "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19"}, {"id": 777028624, "item_id": 48564289, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48564289", "by": "Incipient", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we've been using a fairly basic mssql box for years in a organisation of about 300 and it humms along nicely", "excerpt": "Hey I mean we've been using a fairly basic mssql box for years in a organisation of about 300 and it humms along nicely - granted we have 2 'materialised' aggregate tables/views (done in Python) but the TCO is tiny, and there is very little learning curve.", "context": "organisation of about 300", "use_case": "organisation data warehouse", "switched_from": "", "story": "Databricks Launches LTAP: A Unified OLAP/OLTP Data Architecture"}, {"id": 761351347, "item_id": 47584459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584459", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-03-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Both of my SQL providers (MSSQL and SQLite) are first party as well.", "excerpt": "\"Batteries included\" ecosystems are the only persistent solution to the package manager problem. If your first party tooling contains all the functionality you typically need, it's possible you can be productive with zero 3rd party dependencies. In practice you will tend to have a few, but you won't be vendoring out critical things like HTTP, TCP, JSON, string sanitation, cryptography. These are beacons for attackers", "context": "works in regulated software", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Axios Compromised on NPM \u2013 Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 795802034, "item_id": 49737627, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737627", "by": "qingcharles", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I'm embarrassed that I worked on projects now that were paying huge sums for licenses when .NET works so absolutely well with every other DB.", "excerpt": "I can't even remember the last time I used MSSQL with .NET. I'm embarrassed that I worked on projects now that were paying huge sums for licenses when .NET works so absolutely well with every other DB. These days I just use EF with Sqlite on 99% of my projects.", "context": ".NET developer", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"}, {"id": 779810513, "item_id": 48738157, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738157", "by": "Grombobulous", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "all these great tools that make MS SQL convenient are more like band-aids to a mediocre experience", "excerpt": "I don\u2019t mean to be annoyingly contrarian or argumentative with this statement: I\u2019m definitely not convinced by both of your comments on this subject. \u201cComfort\u201d is not really a tangible benefit. For example, I am personally very comfortable with Chef software for configuration management of VM-deployed applications, but I am quite aware that my own comfort doesn't make it a superior solution versus containerizing appl", "context": "former de facto DBA for MS SQL", "use_case": "database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19"}, {"id": 744848419, "item_id": 46553026, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553026", "by": "KronisLV", "date": "2026-01-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "people opt for Windows Server or SQL Server or Oracle DB, or other software like that - if you have a good reason to use them, sure, go ahead, but that shouldn\u2019t be your default", "excerpt": "If I was better versed in writing and happened to be someone relevant, at the very least I\u2019d support the viewpoint that open source is good for preventing takeovers and software dependencies turning hostile (e.g. Valkey and OpenSearch at least existing) and preventing being held financially hostage in times of uncertainty (e.g. many Linux server side distros are free and FOSS relational DBs won\u2019t bankrupt you). Yet p", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "European Commission issues call for evidence on open source"}]}], "who": [{"by": "ajitgoel", "context": "hiring at Empower Pharmacy", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982648", "date": "2026-10-06"}, {"by": "aljgz", "context": "worked on a large-scale sales program", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734524", "date": "2026-06-30"}, {"by": "Incipient", "context": "organisation of about 300", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48564289", "date": "2026-06-16"}, {"by": "dnnddidiej", "context": ".NET developer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081986", "date": "2026-05-10"}, {"by": "bob1029", "context": "works in regulated software", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584459", "date": "2026-03-31"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["database", "database administration with agents", "in-database machine learning", "indexed views for sales stock", "organisation data warehouse"], "compared": [{"slug": "sqlite", "name": "SQLite", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "postgresql", "name": "PostgreSQL", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "net", "name": ".NET", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "ssms", "name": "SSMS", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "libreoffice", "name": "LibreOffice", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "microsoft-office", "name": "Microsoft Office", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "windows-server", "name": "Windows Server", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733031", "title": "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50217500", "title": "Twelve years of distributed SQLite", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922569", "title": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711424", "title": "Performance Improvements in .NET 11", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027955", "title": "Ask: Why does everything Microsoft create lately feel fragile and half-baked?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897975", "title": "Show HN: I implemented a neural network in SQL", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"warn": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"warn": 1}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 803597008, "item_id": 50224813, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224813", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-10-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Now I can throw a T-SQL script at it in a few seconds to make it behave.", "excerpt": "I am the same way with MSSQL. I used to avoid it like the plague because of how the permissions/logins/everything worked. Now I can throw a T-SQL script at it in a few seconds to make it behave.", "context": "", "use_case": "database administration with agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twelve years of distributed SQLite"}, {"id": 799722370, "item_id": 49982648, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982648", "by": "ajitgoel", "date": "2026-10-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Tech stack: Java / Spring Boot, React / Next.js, Azure (Service Bus, Kubernetes), SQL Server.", "excerpt": "Empower Pharmacy is hiring engineers to work on event-driven, distributed systems that actually run a real-world business (regulated pharma), not ad tech or yet another CRUD SaaS. We just filled one Staff Engineer role directly from my last LinkedIn post (thanks to everyone who shared/applied). Now we\u2019re expanding the team: - 1 Staff Software Engineer - 4 Senior Software Engineers - 4 Software Engineers (new grad / e", "context": "hiring at Empower Pharmacy", "use_case": "database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)"}, {"id": 795802034, "item_id": 49737627, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737627", "by": "qingcharles", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I'm embarrassed that I worked on projects now that were paying huge sums for licenses when .NET works so absolutely well with every other DB.", "excerpt": "I can't even remember the last time I used MSSQL with .NET. I'm embarrassed that I worked on projects now that were paying huge sums for licenses when .NET works so absolutely well with every other DB. These days I just use EF with Sqlite on 99% of my projects.", "context": ".NET developer", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"}, {"id": 784449857, "item_id": 49028116, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028116", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-07-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026:", "excerpt": "Microsoft is a big place. I recommend focusing on the parts they do well rather than getting tribal. All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026: Windows Server SQL Server .NET/C#/F#/Nuget Visual Studio [code] SSMS AAD/EntraID Defender DirectX Excel I agree that Teams still kind of sucks and that Azure is a complete dumpster fire of a cloud, on average. But that doesn't mean we should throw the p", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask: Why does everything Microsoft create lately feel fragile and half-baked?"}, {"id": 782406017, "item_id": 48900376, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900376", "by": "sixdimensional", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used ML algorithms in SQL Server many years ago around 2005 I think.", "excerpt": "In the past platforms have integrated ML algorithms into relational databases and SQL through extensions (both commercial and open source). A famous open source one was MADlib [1], which has an implementation of neural networks. Even the commercial ones were similar, I used ML algorithms in SQL Server many years ago around 2005 I think. I am wondering about.. SQL as a declarative structured query language that can be", "context": "", "use_case": "in-database machine learning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: I implemented a neural network in SQL"}, {"id": 779810513, "item_id": 48738157, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738157", "by": "Grombobulous", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "all these great tools that make MS SQL convenient are more like band-aids to a mediocre experience", "excerpt": "I don\u2019t mean to be annoyingly contrarian or argumentative with this statement: I\u2019m definitely not convinced by both of your comments on this subject. \u201cComfort\u201d is not really a tangible benefit. For example, I am personally very comfortable with Chef software for configuration management of VM-deployed applications, but I am quite aware that my own comfort doesn't make it a superior solution versus containerizing appl", "context": "former de facto DBA for MS SQL", "use_case": "database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19"}, {"id": 779752384, "item_id": 48734524, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734524", "by": "aljgz", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Indexed views are much faster than trying to achieve the same result with triggers.", "excerpt": "Indexed views are much faster than trying to achieve the same result with triggers. Triggers have serious concurrency limitations, and you do recalculations even when the fields you depend on are not touched. Indexed views are not much worse than indexes. Of course, when they refer to other tables there are underlying data lookups, but in our experience when we moved from triggers to indexed views, large scale data i", "context": "worked on a large-scale sales program", "use_case": "indexed views for sales stock", "switched_from": "", "story": "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19"}, {"id": 777028624, "item_id": 48564289, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48564289", "by": "Incipient", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we've been using a fairly basic mssql box for years in a organisation of about 300 and it humms along nicely", "excerpt": "Hey I mean we've been using a fairly basic mssql box for years in a organisation of about 300 and it humms along nicely - granted we have 2 'materialised' aggregate tables/views (done in Python) but the TCO is tiny, and there is very little learning curve.", "context": "organisation of about 300", "use_case": "organisation data warehouse", "switched_from": "", "story": "Databricks Launches LTAP: A Unified OLAP/OLTP Data Architecture"}, {"id": 769311776, "item_id": 48081986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081986", "by": "dnnddidiej", "date": "2026-05-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We used SQL Server and collected a pay cheque", "excerpt": "As a .NET guy there wasn't much discourse. We used SQL Server and collected a pay cheque. Open source wasn't as big. I heard of MySQL and Postgres but thought they were cheap shared hosting thing and university academic thing respectively.", "context": ".NET developer", "use_case": "database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Before Open Source took over the server, what was the discourse like?"}, {"id": 761351347, "item_id": 47584459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584459", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-03-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Both of my SQL providers (MSSQL and SQLite) are first party as well.", "excerpt": "\"Batteries included\" ecosystems are the only persistent solution to the package manager problem. If your first party tooling contains all the functionality you typically need, it's possible you can be productive with zero 3rd party dependencies. In practice you will tend to have a few, but you won't be vendoring out critical things like HTTP, TCP, JSON, string sanitation, cryptography. These are beacons for attackers", "context": "works in regulated software", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Axios Compromised on NPM \u2013 Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan"}, {"id": 744848419, "item_id": 46553026, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553026", "by": "KronisLV", "date": "2026-01-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "people opt for Windows Server or SQL Server or Oracle DB, or other software like that - if you have a good reason to use them, sure, go ahead, but that shouldn\u2019t be your default", "excerpt": "If I was better versed in writing and happened to be someone relevant, at the very least I\u2019d support the viewpoint that open source is good for preventing takeovers and software dependencies turning hostile (e.g. Valkey and OpenSearch at least existing) and preventing being held financially hostage in times of uncertainty (e.g. many Linux server side distros are free and FOSS relational DBs won\u2019t bankrupt you). Yet p", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "European Commission issues call for evidence on open source"}]}