[duncans]

I develop against MSSQL most of the time and have tinkered with Postgres a bit was agreeing with most of the points, until I got to:

> "but MS SQL Server does have a bizarre failure mode which I have witnessed more than once: its transaction logs become enormous and prevent the database from working. In theory the logs can be truncated or deleted but the documentation is full of dire warnings against such action."

This belies what appears to be a fundamental ignorance of SQL Server and is not at all bizarre. If a database has been deployed in a non-simple recovery model, then the transaction log needs to be truncated as part of a backup procedure. If this isn't the case then you should have hired a/better DBA.