My sentiments exactly. Anyone at the low side of scale thinking about MS SQL, should seriously do a current survey of things in the dbms space.. there is absolutely no NEED to pay for dbms in 2026. Those old dinosours only still exist, because of the data hijacking nature of past db designs and coding. Everybody and their grandmother were obfuscating code and designs in order to bake in customer loyalty and repetitive patronage. Those old projects are keeping the lights on at proprietary DB Inc. AT the high end of things, you're gonna need db engineers, and if you get yourself Microsoftie hammersharks disguised as professional engineers, they gonna see everything as a nail.
It really is a good database. Give it lots of room. If you can distribute your workload on multiple machines though, you can't beat Postgres' licencing terms vs SQL Server.
Why is it a good database? Integration with Entra? I've heard arguments in favor of Oracle DB, but I've never heard anything good about MSSQL besides integration with the MS ecosystem.
That’s kind of my point. They’re not really in competition. I bet they’d have an easier time with this scale if they were on SQL Server, but obviously that migration isn’t happening and startups don’t reach for it for many reasons.
In 2026 is SQL Server ever the answer?
My sentiments exactly. Anyone at the low side of scale thinking about MS SQL, should seriously do a current survey of things in the dbms space.. there is absolutely no NEED to pay for dbms in 2026. Those old dinosours only still exist, because of the data hijacking nature of past db designs and coding. Everybody and their grandmother were obfuscating code and designs in order to bake in customer loyalty and repetitive patronage. Those old projects are keeping the lights on at proprietary DB Inc. AT the high end of things, you're gonna need db engineers, and if you get yourself Microsoftie hammersharks disguised as professional engineers, they gonna see everything as a nail.
It really is a good database. Give it lots of room. If you can distribute your workload on multiple machines though, you can't beat Postgres' licencing terms vs SQL Server.
Why is it a good database? Integration with Entra? I've heard arguments in favor of Oracle DB, but I've never heard anything good about MSSQL besides integration with the MS ecosystem.
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That’s kind of my point. They’re not really in competition. I bet they’d have an easier time with this scale if they were on SQL Server, but obviously that migration isn’t happening and startups don’t reach for it for many reasons.
The software licencing of 50 read replicas alone would make sqlserver a non-starter