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Comment by s00pcan | Hacker News Reader

SQL Server unfortunately. I was reminded why I hate it today when I was trying to set up a simple remote connection to the instance running on my new Windows 7 machine. TCP/IP enabled, IPv4 addresses activated and enabled, remote connections enabled, firewall disabled (for now), and it still didn't work!

I tried introducing MySQL over a year ago only to have some hilarious emails with a senior programmer about how we would have to pay for MySQL. The GPL is not hard to read, but some people don't consider anything not made by Microsoft worth using. Like Linux. "No one uses Linux in the real world!" "PHP is for small personal websites!" - real quotes, sadly.

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I've never worked much with other databases other than SQL Server. But one time I had to work with Oracle and MySQL, I had trouble getting a good enough client (like SQL Server Management Studio) even though I was ready to pay.

May be it's my personal preference, I tried many clients (TOAD, DBArtisan, SQL Developer, SQL Plus etc.) and found that none was as polished (not that i'm mentioning functional) and integrates well with Windows as the one from Microsoft.

It's off topic, but the same applies for Visual Studio and other IDEs.

I will say that the SQL Server Management Studio is a great tool, but because it's a GUI tool everything has to be buried in menus. If you plan on using it, read a guide first, because it's not entirely intuitive. It has the occasional cryptic error message or even unhandled exception, but my biggest annoyance is this: You can copy in rows from results and paste them to insert rows, but say you made a mistake and paste in hundreds of rows that don't fit the database schema: you will get hundreds of messagebox popups. The only way out I've found is to end the process.

The SQL Server Management tool is pretty good. And to be honest, I've actually never had a problem using SQL Server. It's been a solid, dependable database on any number of applications for me over the years. Granted, the businesses have been less on the startup side and more on the larger older organisation side of things.

> but some people don't consider anything not made by Microsoft worth using.

Also some people don't consider anything made by Microsoft worth using.

Perhaps your senior programmer did fall into the former category, I don't know. However, you should take care not to fall into the latter.

This isn't something I would do; I know that every tool has its use. I basically own the website and wanted to do a PHP/MySQL site, but we are under contract to use .Net and my supervisor wants to not do anything that could be considered a breach of contract. However, now that I'm using Linux as my main operating system I am constantly being reminded of how the different philosophies between the operating systems affect me. Ninite is a great tool, but installing everything I want from packages is simply awesome. And of course, Linux systems don't need to be restarted in order to apply updates, but on Windows you always need to. This is why I have to possibly go to our data center tomorrow morning if the Server 2008 box our database is on doesn't come back up for remote access when I update it tonight.

> you should take care not to fall into the latter

Like pg? "I never used Microsoft software" http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

If licensing and running on Windows would not be an issue, I'd choose SQL Server over Mysql any day.

I sort of would too... but then again PostgreSQL runs just fine in Windows.

I only have experience with SQL Server Express (my employer was still using their licensed copy of SQL Server 2000 when I got there in 2009). There are a lot of features I'd love to have that are missing from the free version such as replication and automation tools.

Have you tried to do the same thing with MySQL and had success? There's a lot of things in your example that could be causing you grief other than the type of SQL Server you are running; i.e. Network Security, Local Security Configuration (Both machines), User Error (is this something you setup all the time?)

I had similar problems with previous installs, but those are fairly infrequent. I'm sure I'll go in tomorrow and figure it out. This was one of the few things I didn't document how I did it, probably because I was so relieved at getting it to finally work. A student I went to school with just got a new job and one of the tests they had him perform was to log into a local instance of SQL Server using the Management Studio. The catch was the service wasn't started. Too easy... they should have made him do this!

Just as a side note, make sure you had SQL browser service running! It is not running by default on some setups

As far as I can tell, it doesn't work with SQL Server Express. It's there on the configuration tool, but it's disabled completely.

The GPL doesn't forbid charging for software licensed with it. The Free Software Foundation even encourages you to sell your GPL'ed software [1]. However, once you have the software, you can do whatever you like with it, and that includes giving it away for free.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Right, which is why some companies (such as MySQL AB) charge for support and custom tools instead of the software itself (which is always free to use). The senior programmer I spoke of called them and their marketing staff was of course desperate at the chance to make some money, so she came off thinking that we would have to pay for MySQL. And of course, there's the whole "you have to release all of your source code if you use MySQL anywhere our system!" fallacy.

What error were you getting? The first time I had to set up SQL Server it was a total ballache and I struggled with the same problem for a while. But like most things, after you do it once it's becomes easymode for the future.

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