Microsoft SQL Server Reviews in June 2025: User Ratings, Pros & Cons

Familiar and Comfortable

What do you like best? Array of tools to monitor as well as good UI for when I'm feeling lazy. There is a great range of external tools that come with it for monitoring queries as well as processes. Also, creating new DBs, tables, and jobs is as easy as writing a script, or right clicking and going through a wizard. What do you dislike? Compatibility modes make it a little difficult when programming for multiple clients on different versions. But this is more of an issue on us to make ...

Best solution for non-tech enterprise-level data management

What do you like best? Free Express edition for desktop and small server databases up to 10GB. Interacting with data more directly, in SQL Server Management Studio. What do you dislike? SQL Server often challenged to due to limitations of integration to 3rd party software like MySQL etc. Recommendations to others considering the product For the most advanced data workloads, or for simpler internal reporting, Microsoft SQL Server is designed to simplify the data management. It can ...

SQL Server is a trusted platform that is slowly growing into a new data landscape.

What do you like best? Having worked with SQL server for over a decade, I have come to rely on its simplicity over some database systems, as well as the well established education and support system Microsoft has in place. What do you dislike? SQL Server is unfortunately slow to adapt to the changing requirements of the IT and data landscapes, lagging behind in high availability and compatibility areas. Recommendations to others considering the product SQL Server is not always the ...

Review on MS SQL Server Management Studio

What do you like best? This is the Perfect tool to quickly access the DBs, query the DB and perform quick modifications on the DB where the user has access to. This tool can also be used by semi-technical folks who are not so tech savvy but still have to query the DB with ready SQL queries for their regular data analysis tasks. As this is comparatively light and installation can be quiet faster, however there should be a remote DB available to get access to and for querying What do you ...

Easy Fast and Effective

What do you like best? Easy software no gimmicks outstanding graphics and chats. Very easy to understand use and publish helps great with video conferencing. amazing speed hardly ever any fixes or bugs no shut downs either. The speed at which the thing goes is absolutely amazing great for video calling overseas also the ability to screen share and other neat fixes. What do you dislike? There is nothing to dislike everything works exactly as it should no issues. Better than any other ...

Solid Enterprise Database

What do you like best? Reliable; relatively easy to administer; huge amount of paid and free books, videos, blogs, forums, third-party products available; actively being improved by Microsoft. I would say the ecosystem around SQL Server is second to none. It is supported by many vendors of other products. In decades of part-time use I have found almost no bugs in the product. I also like Microsoft's recent effort to port SQL Server to Linux. Azure opens more possibilities. What do you ...

Great for database work

What do you like best? I enjoy using Microsoft SQL Server because it's very well documented and supported, and the software is used by a large number of people so there is a big support community. When I have a question about how to do something it's easy to find information either in the documentation or online. What do you dislike? I really don't like that I can't use it with my Mac. I have a Windows machine and a Mac at work and I have to do all of my SQL Server stuff on the Windows ...

Proven solution for 5+ years

What do you like best? We have been using SQL Server for different projects since about 2010. Even though we are a small business, we still have a big need for an enterprise level DBMS. We have some business management systems and even our website using SQL Server Standard. I do like that SQL server is very easy to manage and there's a lot of tech information out there to fix any issues that come up. The updates are easy and I don't really have to worry much about reliability or speed ...

Love it!

What do you like best? This was the first software I used/learned right out of college. I only had exposure to Java for a semester and picked this up right away. I use many other programming languages and SSMS has a fantastic interface. I am in analytics and use SAS, R, Python, and SPSS and still go back to my roots in SQL. I download SQL Express, which is free, for my local data manipulation and storage. I enjoy how they are always updating the interface to be "slicker" as it makes the ...

Microsoft SQL Server 2012

What do you like best? SQL Server out of the box comes with number of great services/functionalities like SSIS (Integration Services, SSMDS (Master Data Services, SSRS (Reporting Services. What do you dislike? Particularly when it comes to coding and development in SQL Server, code reuse is pretty difficult to achieve. Performance tuning can be an issues sometimes. Recommendations to others considering the product In my opinion, Microsoft is improving in the right direction with SQL ...