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Comment by blahblahOOO | Hacker News Reader

As a DBA, that has years of experience with both. I disagree with you.

I stopped reading after the very first bullet, and just skimmed through most of the titles.

First, you can import/export csv's. Hell all you need to do to export, is right click the view and hit export, then select .csv.

Second, you don't want such a simple installation, MSSQL has several options/packages/configurations. If you don't need it you turn it off, otherwise you will be charged a fee.

That being said, if you have chocolatey installed in powershell. It's also a one line command, and you can configure your own custom installation command.

choco install MsSqlServer2012Express

Third, I don't feel like correcting the rest of your mistakes.

I'm not shitting on Postgres, it's pretty awesome, but out of the box MSSQL is better. Especially when you have hundreds of severs running it.

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The author spends quite some time explaining that MS SQL Server's CSV is mangled and broken, and what you've said is that it exports CSV. So what does your comment contribute, except to say that you didn't read the article?

QFA "MS SQL Server can neither import nor export CSV"

I took it to mean "can neither import nor export conformant CSV"

Yeah, me too. The author points this out painstakingly too. I'm not familiar with MS SQL CSV exporting so I can't verify the truth of that statement though.

that's a deliberately obtuse response formed by avoiding reading the 478 words of supporting detail immediately following. Certainly there exist csvs mssql will import. But I've run into problems with nested quoting, commas inside fields, and unicode. I'm apparently far from the only one. So I think it's hardly hyperbole to say mssql doesn't support csv.

My experience with MsSql has been more like You can sorta kinda export CSV files that will mostly work in Excel if the data happens to be just right. His description of how easy it is in Postgres makes me want to grab a copy and try it out. I really hope somebody tells me that there is infact a way to export query results from MsSql to CSV if the text columns might contain commas that isn't a huge ugly PITA.

I don't know about most of the other stuff, honestly. I've never felt the need to write scripting code into database queries or write my own aggregate functions, so I have no idea what would be better at that. I'll take his word that Postgres is better, and grab it if I ever find myself having to do that.

> First, you can import/export csv's. Hell all you need to do to export, is right click the view and hit export, then select .csv.

Are you saying there is no programatic interface for exporting csv? You must rely on the administration tool to generate the csv for you???

@sergiosgc Nope. There are several ways of doing this. Using the GUI is the easiest, and the most common method. You can use SSIS, or the bcp command.

For example:

bcp "SELECT blah... FROM blah" queryout C:\..\blah.csv -c -t, -T –S<servername>

I have spent quite a bit of time in the past trying to import CSV data to SQL Server. It's just about possible, but bcp (and its format files) are absolutely horrifying. As far as I could tell, other methods of importing data involved either having access to put files onto the server so it could read them or getting SSIS to work - both pretty much impossible in a large organisation.

If there was one thing the author was right about it was MSSQL's poor CSV support. BCP doesn't handle escaping special characters in CSV (e.g. commas, quotes, tabs if you using tabs as delimiter).

Although I've had experience with both PostgreSQL and MS SQL, well over 90% of my experience is with the former.

When exporting data to CSV where a text field contains the delimiter, PostgreSQL will do the correct thing every time: wrap that field in quotes. MS SQL...will not.

That's where MS tends to bug me. Why wasn't that fixed within a few hours of somebody discovering the problem? I ran into a similar issue on an app I just wrote that spits out CSVs. I googled, found a stackoverflow post about how to escape CSVs properly with Excel in mind, and fixed it. One primarily JavaScript dev and maybe an hour of testing, diagnosis and repair.

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