Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Express
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I'm not convinced anyone would use express for production purposes anyway due to the fairly severe memory/thread limitations.
No doubt other databases might be 'better' in various ways, but the Express version really is nice to work with and (yes, sorry to admit) it's an easier sell to customers than non-MS solutions (at least for me).
We've still got a trick up our sleeves in terms of performance boosting by moving the server to SSDs instead of magnetic drives.
FYI all my other clients running 'Express' consist of small companies with 10 or fewer users, and they are more than happy with performance (or at least aren't willing to pay the large MS fees for a 'proper' version of MS SQL Server).
Either you have Enterprise Windows (costs about as much as professional with the CALS), or the software you are running is only local to that server. The Microsoft treadmill is expensive.
If you building some internal business app, then you need CALS.
That also appears to only cover web servers that do not have any login capability. Why on earth would you spend that kind of money to host a static site?
You would license SQL sever on a core based licensing model, which doesn't use CAL's.
If anyone can purchase a login to your website, that's still classed as public. What its means is internal apps require licenses.
[0]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/sql-server-pr...
EnterpriseDB which is basically support for PostGres is almost as expensive.
Special licenses for various uses cases is another big plus for FOSS/PostgreSQL. Life is easier when adding database nodes or spinning up a dev/qa database is purely a technical issue.
In regards to documentation: Microsoft have very good documentation for developers. The SQL Server documentation is at least AS good as the Postgresql documentation, if not better.
It's really weird to approach Microsoft from the developer side, because they have absolutely wonderful products like Visual Studio, C#, Exchange, Active Directory, and SQL Server, but at the same time they have Windows. I feel that Windows, at least the desktop version, is somehow a second tier product, where the quality isn't on par with their other products.
I'm not sure that's really a great comparison (and I really like PostgreSQL) - SQL Server is really a family of products that all depend on the database server component of SQL Server (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS) and that comes with easy integration with lots of applications from Microsoft (e.g. the Dynamics CRM and ERP products) as well as hundreds of 3rd party products.
Printer drivers can still crash Windows, and if you screw them up, you can be force to just reinstall. Javascript in Firefox managed to crash a display driver earlier to day. Still Windows is "okay", in terms of stability, but if something goes wrong, like yesterday when my wireless NIC stopped working, there's absolutely no help from Windows in terms of figuring out why. Logging is pretty much non-existent, it's like arguing with a wacko girlfriend who's mad at you, but won't tell you why.
Really the interface is the major pain point for me. It simply feels clunky and slow. There's a serious lack of consistency across the UI. Windows 10 is really bad about this, having two control panels for instance, and still being part metro, part Windows XP. Just the whole filesystem layout of the C:\Users\<username> is weird. It's as if Windows have gone to create lengths to hide the "home folder", for no apparent reason. Generally the filesystem is just weird and confusing. Search rarely work. The "Ubuntu on Windows" does fix some of my issues though, because having a modern operating system, and no "Unix layer" is a hindrance, to me at least.
If there's a point to my rambling it's something along the line that Windows is missing an overall strategy. Currently it sits in a weird spot between being for the absolute novice, and the computer expert, while fulfilling neither role.
I don't understand this. It seems less hidden than C:\Documents And Settings\<username>. In fact, it seems fairly prominent to me. Where could they put it that would be less hidden?
Getting a decent command line, until very recently, required awkward work-arounds like Cygwin, and a lot of common dev tools tend to feel like second-class citizens. Package/dependency management just wasn't there, though I hear they're starting to fix this.
In order not to mistake my comment with an attack (it really isn't) one reason is tooling. Postgres doesn't have 1/10th of the tooling available for SQL Server. Another is BI. There isn't a better BI stack out there than Microsoft's. Also the price if very small compared to the competition and licensing costs are dwarfed by implementation costs, in general. So no, SQL Server is not expensive at all. Also the documentation is actually very, very good.
So while Postgresql's defaults are all about technical concerns, Sql server's defaults are just convenient for Microsoft sales team.
Express is basically free, its the real production versions that cost.
There are also some questions/answers on StackOverflow [1] that suggest you can mostly get by with doing SSIS stuff against the Express version as well, but you don't get all the capabilities.
[0] https://github.com/spc-ofp/RelinkSSRS [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/292564/can-i-run-ssis-pac...
It's not even funny how far ahead MS are in the BI space (ask $DATA shareholders). It's not healthy to be honest.
Dashboards, reports, etc are a pain - but its what the clients want. They don't really care what we're doing in the background, they just want their metrics and analytics reports. Power BI has made that part of my job 100x better.
This is a mode of operation that has been supported by Microsoft's SSAS OLAP engine for years.
It works quite well, but you do run into some performance overhead with the transpiling step.
Feel free to reach out if you have more detailed questions. I work for an analytics consultancy and we're a Microsoft partner. I live in the Microsoft data platform (SQL Server and all related products).
Why would you send data offsite to generate pretty graphs of it? Is this really not available as a self-hosted service?
There is a Power BI Desktop program that is 100% free as in beer available, which runs a private instance of an in-memory columnstore OLAP engine, Power Pivot (same internals as SSAS). It also includes the reporting layer and Power Query, a lightweight ETL tool.
There is an on-prem version of Power BI that the team has committed to including as a feature of SSRS in SQL Server 2016, but the timeline is still fuzzy.
The point of the Power BI hosted portal is not the pretty visuals, but a low-maintenance collaboration portal that includes natural language Q&A on your data, automatic analysis to identify trends in the data, and tight integration with Office 365.
If you want to go on-prem, there is a third party named Pyramid Analytics which offers a solution that allows Power BI hosting.
Power BI is actually a continuation of a number of products. If you want a somewhat equivalent experience on-prem, you can use Power Pivot in Excel (2010+), with Power View on SharePoint (SSRS 2012+, SharePoint 2010+), which gives you an older Silverlight-based report engine that has similar capabilities.
The real useful piece, though is the semantic layer in Power Pivot, which is identical to SSAS. The power in any BI tool is not the reporting layer (though Power View is a pretty good one for the use cases it targets), but in the power and expressivity of the data model. This is an area where Microsoft shines.
I could go on for hours about this - I work in technical presales (and do at least 50% time in a technical delivery role) for an analytics consulting firm that is a Microsoft partner.
There is a third party offering an on-prem solution.
Pyramid offers .pbix file hosting and web rendering. It does not offer the Power BI portal that is a cloud offering from Microsoft. There is a big difference between these things.
This is a fact, I work with this thing for about 5 years (this is my karma) and there is not a single day where this doesn't cause a problem or makes somebody to lose 3-5 hours of work.
We have about 3000 people and this is overkill for our needs.
You know what the reason? Because people say that it is awesome, then a naive engineer decide to use it basically due to this propaganda in a LOCAL but central piece of our pipeline (something that SQLite would fit perfectly!) and then everything after becomes a problem.
Now we're stuck with it to day and nobody can change without a lot of work and trouble. I'm basically one of the people responsible in a strike team to fix SQL server issues in production.
> But you need to reboot on install, updates and uninstall,
Our tech team schedules one member to work from midnight to 2 AM on "patch day"
As an alternative you could architect for rolling updates across load-balanced systems.
I'm not personally fussed about the drawbacks either way, the mitigation is easily planned for. It becomes a part of the cost-benefit analysis.
Now consider the world of containers, startup is actually ridiculously quick. In addition they need to be patched far less frequently. They have less "cruft" from the get go.
I'd recommend this entire video, but this graph highlights some of the advantages: https://youtu.be/XVtsw-uzovA?t=500
70% fewer reboots required on containers. 90% fewer critical patches.
> all these operations that can take up to two hours for no reason.
They both point to the same physical files. When the old machine finishes its current cycle, it shuts down gracefully.
Fully mitigated by a container workflow.
> And the express edition is capped at 10gb db.
The express edition is intended to be used by developers and "small data" applications.
I don't see what the express edition license is from this link, but I'm sure it is expressly not intended to be an enterprise database.
If I were downvoting you, it would likely be because you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this.
Once we get SQLSERVER running in containers, there's nothing to say we can't swap out to the enterprise edition virtually seamlessly.
> So, no, SQL server is nothing better than alternatives at least if you aren't in the big ones and DBA is your job.
So, with respect, I'd suggest you're not getting downvoted for "facts" but for "tone"
Even your follow up comes across as, I almost want to say "entitled"
I'm sorry, I don't want to start a flame war with you, but I'm letting you know what my "read" of your post comes across as.
If you're offended by it I'm happy to delete.
Yes, but we should be able to share personal experiences in comments doesn't? Or else how can we share each other points of view?
I still fail to see what is wrong with my tone in that wording, may be a language issue as English is my third language.
By that I mean mostly: To our experience, there are better alternatives if you're not a DBA as full day job or Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
And, besides that, even with container and schedule and procedures, I fail to see how rebooting still something acceptable now-days. This is highly counter productive.
English as a third language would explain the "tone" issue as the "nuance" (or subtlety) of you point would likely be harder to communicate.
I think acknowledging the good parts before delivering constructive criticism might help, but then, internet voting sites are also tremendously fickle and difficult to predict.
I think this post above does manage to communicate your point without sounding as negative.
In my case, I work at an agency - so our choice of database is in some ways driven by more than just the best tool for the job, but one that inspires our clients' trust AND is cost effective to work with. MSSQL does an excellent job of "inspiring trust" but it is also amazingly easy to develop for.
Our clients aren't worried about "overkill" or buying more database than they need. In the scope of a multi-million dollar project, the overpowered database is worth the piece of mind.
None of us on this end are "married" to SQL SERVER, but since we already own the license for one, and offer shared hosting of the database server or give a pass-through-cost for a dedicated server, it seems like a perfectly reasonable choice.
But we've both got our perspective and yours offers a good perspective. "As a DBA, SQLSERVER is often overkill" but if the client prioritises stability, recover-ability, maintainability, over cost (a "one time cost" of roughly 25% of one employee's salary) & two hours of downtime a week it's not such a bad choice.
I think you're missing the point of having this in a Docker container.
Docker would help my case if it wasn't required to run on Windows Server! This could be an interesting solution if it worked on Windows 7 and Windows 10.
But even then our legacy code would require some changes to be able to communicate with it.
So, psql, mysql, sqlite or no matter what is better in any aspect for our point of view.
Seamless from user perspective.
I assume other database products require downtime for updates, and use similar strategies to avoid user issues.
Business Intelligence helps corporations analyze on their core competency in order to synergize growth strategies globally for cloud-centric and client-focused innovation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
xD
You care in the case when your predecessors fell for the lock-in tricks. Database doing job scheduling, actual code in the database (SSIS and the rest), and thing like that.
Read replicas, master master, failovers, streaming updated to outside data stores like elastic search before the feature sets are even compared have huge associated costs in workarounds.
Want a couple? $300,000.
Big client that you'd like to isolate on their own hardware? $$$$
It's approximately 3-4 k per core using standard.
In-memory columnstore indices (since 2012, but realistically since 2014/2016). Huge benefit for large analytical queries. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg492088.aspx
Native row-level security (2016). https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn765131.aspx
Native always-encrypted support - database never sees plaintext (2016). Streamlines workflow, but this is doable with Postgres - questionable inclusion. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn765131.aspx
Dynamic data masking - don't use for security, though (2016). https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt130841.aspx
R engine in DB (2016). https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt604845.aspx
Others have covered the things that fall out of the relational engine below, including SSIS[0] for ETL and dataflow programming, SSAS[1] for semantic modeling and analytics workloads, SSRS[2][3] for reporting.
There's also MDS[4] for master data management, native support for an elastic database (partition across on-prem and Azure SQL)[5], built in HA [6], and a whole lot more around monitoring and instrumentation.
This is not meant as a fanboy post, but you asked what is part of SQL Server that you don't get with Postgres. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I work for a Microsoft partner so I get exposed to this stuff all day long.
[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141026.aspx
[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb522607.aspx
[2] Traditional paginated reporting platform and also a newer mobile dashboarding tool based on an acquisition.
[3] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159106.aspx
[4] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff487003.aspx
[5] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql...
I dont know of any hypervisors that let you do multiple instance of the same vm using diff disks?
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831602(v=ws.11...
For one they seem to use the single known account (sa) which we disable EVERYWHERE because it's the first biggest known most common target of attack. In fact it's dangerous to use because it will lock randomly when anyone inside the company or elsewhere runs a scan and attempts a few passwords on it.
Secondly SS is made to be patched. We get a new patch every single fucking month and sometimes twice a month. I spend 4 days per month simple patching SQL across half a thousand servers. This shit will never see it. Is this patchable? Not by any standard tools.
Is this even discoverable? Fuck no. Nobody will know it exists. We don't do port scans - we look for known SQL services and use the SMO WMI ManagedComputer tools to identify them. This will work with neither.
I've seen what developers do to their environments. Hundreds of copies of their databases. No backups (so logs grow and fill the disks and then I get called). No maintenance. Of course Express has no job scheduler so you're fucked anyway which is why I don't support it and instead move everyone onto Developer edition WHICH IS FREE.
Anyone using this shit is on their own.
- lower overhead, better resource utilisation: agree
- deployment speed: agree
- consistent environments: a standard docker image is not adding anything over a standard VM image.
- security: I am not a specialist but I doubt containers offer the same level of hardware enforced separation that VM offer
- flexible isolation: what do you have in mind?
- better clustering options: but the SQL server software itself is doing the clustering? Otherwise you will end up with inconsistent datasets
But what I don't understand is the concept of a standard container image. That means this only applies to scenario with static data in the database? Unless this is for database sharding, where you fire up a new empty database to extend a database pool?
I would imagine that this would be much more for testing, as it allows for an isolated, empty db for each load. Beyond that, if you're doing a completely containerized infrastructure. Though I would submit that if you're doing windows containers, odds are you're either internally publishing or publishing to azure, so for production, dedicated SQL server or azure sql would likely be better options.
[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...
Security & Flexible Isolation - I can easily share volumes, link and build overlay networks between containers whilst also keeping everything else namespaced and isolated. containers also isolate processes from each other and allow us to control resources granted to processes (cgroups) which is a security benefit over vm
Clustering - Yes SQL server will cluster, but in a container orchestrator we will get more control of moving processes between nodes to scale, to cover failure scenarios or maximise resource usage of the underlying hosts
Standard Image - You would deploy SQL server container but keep data outside as a volume. Maybe devs would populate the database from a script or network share, or yes join a cluster.
It probably only needs the Windows container-feature. This was first made available in Windows Server 2016.
But today, if you run Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise and have Anniversary Update installed, you should be able to enable the Windows Container-feature there as well.
And that is a much more likely developer-setup.
From their latest newsletters it appears that they intensified cooperation with MS. Hope it does a good turn!
One your workload exceeds that of a normal run of the mill server containers are no longer a good idea. So basically once you start needing to do that which is mostly pointless now anyway with SSDs that would about the time when containers would also be ill suited to your workload.
Also, if you're running docker in prod, have fun :)