Comment by blitzd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blitzd | Hacker News Reader

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> The Microsoft brand has been completely reborn in the eyes of developers over the past few years. The lows of 2007-2010 seem a distant memory.

Maybe in the eyes of some developers - for many of us who are still dependent on MS products that haven't been getting much attention (SQL Server and it's related BI tools), the lows are still getting lower. Sure, there's improvements in the overall functionality (with SQL 2016) - but trying to get bugs fixed (or even acknowledged) for anyone but a fortune 500 company is still an exercise in futility. Trying to get support via MSDN forums (as is a purported benefit of our multiple MSDN developer licenses) is a joke.

We're dropping any MS related tech that we can, because frankly it feels like we're throwing money away when we could be getting the same (or, most likely better) support using open source technologies instead.

I have connect issues that have been open and unacknowledged for going on 4 years now. Meanwhile, I have posted bug reports to open source projects on github and received responses back with 5 minutes of hitting submit.

VS Code is great, don't get me wrong - but the experience with that project is a far cry from the products we've PAID MS to use and develop with.

What exactly open source technologies will give you feature parity and better support than microsoft's BI stack?

Would love an answer on this one. I implemented the MSFT BI stack into a product for no other reason than we were already using MSFT. However, each time I look at OSS BI stacks I feel like I'm losing out on something.

There's nothing that's really comparable at the moment, so far as I know. It's not one of the pieces we've been able to replace.

Reminds me of the 5 year old bug to fix Intellisense completion mode in SSMS, finally fixed in 2016.

The Per-Core licensing cost for SQL Server and now Windows too is really a pain, and getting worse with more and more cores showing up in boxes.

We've got some servers that would be happy to putt along on 2-4 cores, but we're struggling to find anything less than 12 cores with our managed hosting provider - so we have to pay for the extra cores, even though we don't want to use them.

"Consolidate!" - sure, but we can only do that so much. Some stuff we have to deploy regionally for latency reasons, other stuff can't share hardware for PCI compliance reasons. We don't want to have production environments sharing with dev.

Why don't you just run a 4-core VM on your 12-core server and NOT share it with anything else? Wasting the other 8 cores would be worth the licensing savings.

> many of us who are still dependent on MS products that haven't been getting much attention (SQL Server and it's related BI tools)

What about Microsoft's investment in R and integrating it with SQLServer? Seems like at least it's a step in the right direction.

So, because the personal issues you have aren't being addressed, the products aren't getting attention? That's more than a bit of a stretch...

I get frustration with a specific bug not getting fixed. That being said, links to the MSDN posts you've made that have gotten 0 MS attention? Because in my experience, even if the issue can't be fixed, someone at least responds letting you know they're looking into it.

Further, if you're paying for support, I've never had a bug go completely unaddressed.

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