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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

I've just started at a company using MSSQL and it feels like a massive backwards step. This article indirectly shows what's missing with MSSQL - an 'ecosystem' of people developing products on top of it, and a much larger number of people working on what is, ironically, a free product.

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Having experience with both, with small-medium size DB, they have pros and cons. MSSQL wins on ootb tooling, easier monitoring, collations, better query planner, ootb encryption, ootb data compression etc. I have seen running more than 100 databases of hundreds of GBs on a single MSSQL instance without a problem. I heard stories about data corruption, never happened to me.

Postgres wins on (lots of) datatypes, indexes types and plugin ecosystem, eg Postgis is great. Per process connection is meh, but can be mitigated. It loses a lot on all features based on operating system libraries, different OSes give different results, not great, not at all. Also if you are using postgres at enterprise level, better have some kind of support, which may cost a lot.

So far I had less issues with MSSQL than with Postgres. YMMV, ofc.

MSSQL is a beast of a RDBMS. There’s little it can’t do better than Postgres, so you either have to read up on it or the niche you’re in doesn’t fit.

The db that makes you use bit instead of boolean is a beast? I disagree. IMO it’s one of those technologies waiting to die.

If your niche is storing booleans in the DB… then I could see it matters just a bit? Otherwise it’s a stupid legacy nuisance with zero prod impact.

You could’ve pointed out the lackluster json support or lack of generalized indexes, but this? Come on.

MSSQL features that are missing in PostgreSQL are impossible to be made by community. ;)

I am using both PostgreSQL and MSSQL in the production since 2003 and they are simply not in the same league. Especially tooling around MSSQL is miles ahead.

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