[m_st]

I so badly wish we could change a big Windows business application to use PostgreSQL rather than Microsoft SQL Server just because of the licensing costs. SQL Server is a fantastic product, but restricted to 128GB RAM and a few CPU cores or you have to start paying so much, that not even our biggest customers can justify it.

Migration isn't easy, as this venerable application uses ADO.NET Datasets with TableAdapters and plenty of stored procedures. The syntax is almost compatible though. But not enough unfortunately.

For our next product, we're sure to bet on PostgreSQL instead.

[kylecordes]

Yes, this is such a big challenge for commercial database products. PG is so great that it often makes the most sense to reallocate the money to more CPU/RAM/SSD, rather than licenses.

[scarab92]

I just wish it had columnstore support.

[kdmtctl]

Citus can do this. Postgres is good but extensibility makes it best.

[chasil]

An enormous flaw of Sybase/Microsoft SQL Server is that it does not implement the SQL/PSM standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL/PSM

The syntax for this does come largely from Oracle.

"SQL/PSM is derived, seemingly directly, from Oracle's PL/SQL. Oracle developed PL/SQL and released it in 1991, basing the language on the US Department of Defense's Ada programming language."

In any case, I have thousands of lines of PL/SQL written by many people which are currently useless for SQL Server applications.

SQL Server should implement SQL/PSM. The sooner, the better.

For those trying to escape the licensing costs of SQL Server, Babelfish may be an option.

https://babelfishpg.org/

[munchler]

Sybase SQL Server hasn't been a thing for at least a decade. The Microsoft fork happened more than 30 years ago.

[sbuttgereit]

And yet.... it lives still....

https://www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-ase....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Server_Enterprise

[hodgesrm]

> An enormous flaw of Sybase/Microsoft SQL Server is that it does not implement the SQL/PSM standard.

Why is this a problem? I've always enjoyed T-SQL. Right from the start it had a "scripty" feel and stored procedures were easy to code with it. We thought about implementing PSM at Sybase in the 1990s but there was little user demand. (Unlike row level locking, the lack of which undid Sybase SAP implementations...) Internally many of the engineers thought PSM was pretty awful to use. I never liked it myself.

[chasil]

It is an ANSI standard, implemented by many databases.

SQLite's trigger syntax appears to be conformant.

Transact SQL has much fewer implementations, and standards conformance enables interoperability. The SQL Server family is lacking in this respect.

[belter]

Test this:

"Goodbye Microsoft SQL Server, Hello Babelfish" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/goodbye-microsoft-sql-serve...

Or the Opensource project: https://babelfishpg.org/

[bdcravens]

I evaluated this for our database and ran into many cases where it wasn't a 1:1 replacement, especially if you lean heavily on stored procedures. Additionally, our db library (it's a Rails app; the database was originally used with another language) needed features Babelfish didn't support. It may be worth another look for us, but I assume it still shouldn't be considered a 100% drop-in.

[masfoobar]

> I so badly wish we could change a big Windows business application to use PostgreSQL

This ^^^

A small businness I (no longer) work for was using Windows Servers, SQL Server, Classic ASP, .NET and other things. It was expensive!

I tried sooo hard to migrate to get them to realise the savings moving over to Linux and Postgres, and get their DATED software over over afterwards!

Well, it was Linux and MySQL/MariaDB but I have slowly grown fond of Postres over the last couple of years.

I will always remember (and find funny) when we purchased a server a third-party no longer wanted to support for us anymore (linux+php) and my boss said "they only pay £300 a year for that server" -- yep.

[cheema33]

We are in the same boat. An older application with lots of dependencies on MS SQL Server. We are slowly chipping away at it with our migration effort.

[accra4rx]

Go Babelfish

[pmarreck]

LLM's might be able to translate the stored procedure code without too much difficulty, and assuming you have test coverage. Might also do a good job of translating DDL code such as index definitions etc.

I too was impressed with SQL Server last time I used it (big note: SQL Server is one of the few commercial DB's that does real nested transactions; PG does not), but I get it.

[dspillett]

> SQL Server is one of the few commercial DB's that does real nested transactions

More or less. The default ROLLBACK behaviour is to roll back the whole nest. You have to use SAVE TRANSACTION instead of BEGIN TRANSACTION and specify the name in ROLLBACK. If doing this in a procedure that may or may not be part of a nested transaction (an explicit transaction wasn't started before it was called) you have to test to see if you need to BEGIN or SAVE¹ and what to do if a rollback is needed (you likely don't want to ROLLBACK everything if you used SAVE, but have no option if you used BEGIN). Not exactly intuitive. And saved transactions can cause excessive lock escalation, impacting concurrent performance.

SQL Server is generally a damned fine product overall, both generally and compared to a lot of other things emitted by Microsoft, but it isn't even close to perfect in some areas.

----

[1] ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/language-element...

[pmarreck]

Thanks for the clarification.

I'm not one to compliment Microsoft software products, but Analysis Services and SQL Server, at least when I used them at the time over 10 years ago, seemed like darn fine products (which they purchased from someone else, I believe...)

[dspillett]

SQL Server itself came from Sybase originally, with them and MS working on it as partners for a number of years when it was an OS/2 product, so it wasn't a purchase-a-working-product-and-rebrand-it deal. As Windows NT gained ground, MS & Sybase parted ways (amicably IIRC, when the partnership agreements expired MS licensened the source that Sybase owned and bought out exclusive use of the product name in relation to products for Windows – for a time MS's SQL Server still carried Sybase copyright messaging along with MS's own).

SQL Server v7 was a rewrite of significant parts of the internals, so from that point it is probably fair to call it an MS product quite distinct from Sybase's (which itself continued to be separately developed including significant but different improvements/reengineering of the internals), though still showing some signs of its heritage.

[werdnapk]

What's a real nested transaction? What's postgresql missing? https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/subxacts.html

[jiggawatts]

Transactions are the only composable concurrency control primitive, but this requires that they be nestable.

It’s a key “primitive” missing from almost all high-level programming languages, with the notable exception of some SQL dialects.

[pmarreck]

Savepoints are not considered legitimately isolated nested transactions.

To the best of my knowledge.

Note: Am not a DBA, merely a full stack dev that has worked with various databases over the years.

[pmarreck]

Had a fascinating conversation with Claude about this (don't worry about the unhinged personality I gave it with preprompting):

https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/970e5d040f9f91fd9bce8a4bcee...

Pasted it there for brevity here. Also includes an easy way to export a Claude conversation (made with the help of Claude, of course).

[ants_a]

LLMs are not a great source for this type of information. This mess in no way articulated in what way savepoints and transactions are different.

Savepoints are fully equivalent to nested transactions with the constraint that only one is concurrently active. This limitation is just from the SQL standard programming model. At least in PostgreSQL implementation it would be reasonably simple to support multiple concurrent subtransactions. They are even called subtransactions internally.

[jiggawatts]

What on Earth are you using as your system prompt!!?

[pmarreck]

LOL, it's amazing

[BrentOzar]

> SQL Server is one of the few commercial DB's that does real nested transactions

Not sure where this myth keeps coming from, but no, it does not:

https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/a-sql-server-dba-myth-a...

[pmarreck]

Interesting. Is this still up-to-date? The link you posted is 15 years old

[BrentOzar]

Yep, nothing's changed there around transactions.

[cpursley]

You're getting downvoted by gatekeepers but LLMs are amazing with SQL and this is a great use-case.

[hnthrow90348765]

Anecdata, but I agree. I went from a recursive CTE (that occasionally would take 1GB+ of memory for zero rows) to a loop and used AI to do it, and it did a pretty good job

[pmarreck]

Possibly related, talked to an LLM about the whole "who actually does nested transactions" thing and commented about it above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42702610