Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition Is Now Free | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition Is Now Free

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20 pointsximeng8 comments

What's the point of this? I'm still going to need to shell out thousands to deploy to production, no?

of course, but they want people to see what awesome features it has. When developers start liking it they will force the technology into a company even if it's costly.

Well, you now have all features at your hand for development compared do Express. Though in many cases Express may be enough too.

Anyway the license administration is the absolutely worst thing with SQL Server, which is a shame as it is really a great database.

To see if it's the right tool for the task at hand. Sometimes the best solution is Postgres on a *nix box, sometimes it's SQL Server on a Windows box. If it saves more time/money than a solution on another platform, why wouldn't you?

Serious question: is there really any difference between the major RDBMS at this point?

At what workload levels does engine quality come into play? So far I've thrown multi-terabyte/high TP workloads at Oracle, Sybase and DB2, and they've all gotten the job done with a minimum of fuss. This leads me to think that there's really no reason to look at databases as anything other than a commodity service which should be chosen on the basis of cost.

There are certainly differences between the pricing models for these enterprise databases. They are actively developed and have different feature sets, although you might need to look carefully to distinguish between them. There is active competition here (https://redmondmag.com/articles/2016/03/10/sql-server-2016-o...).

Postgresql is good but lacks some of the polish and features of the paid for databases.

Availability and cost of skilled staff and compatibility with existing deployments might also be important. So not critical differences perhaps but squint hard enough and you'll see there are differences nonetheless.

I think the only differences are in the administration and company mentality (i.e some just use Microsoft software or others are strictly open source etc). But from a developer's perspective the features are the more or less the same and unless you do something exotic the basic functionality works the same way.

Or SQL Server on Linux: http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-se...

(unfortunately looks like this article was flagged so we won't see the conversation that would have come from it :( )

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