Comment by Grombobulous

I don’t mean to be annoyingly contrarian or argumentative with this statement: I’m definitely not convinced by both of your comments on this subject.

“Comfort” 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 applications. We just have Chef around because that’s what was chosen 10 years ago.

Obviously, developer/ops familiarity is still valuable, I don’t mean to say it’s not, but there is a point where the band-aid needs to be ripped off.

I have a hunch that all these great tools that make MS SQL convenient are more like band-aids to a mediocre experience. E.g., RedGate replacing multi-million dollar consultancies sounds great, but what’s even better is not needing a multi-million dollar consultancy in the first place.

I will also give you the context that I used to be a defacto DBA for MS SQL. That doesn’t necessarily mean I know what I’m talking about, but I do know that I personally do not miss SSMS or any of the Microsoft ecosystem.

The whole vibe of that ecosystem is “put your life in Microsoft’s hands and do everything Microsoft’s way and we hold your hand and make it easy, except that making everything easy for everyone causes everything to be massively complicated and brittle.”

I still occasionally get StackOverflow notifications for an answer I wrote which was just “try restarting Visual Studio” and even though the version I wrote it for is over a decade old I still get comments that say “this worked for me.”