[breakingcups]

The last time this article came up the consensus was that the author was pretty biased towards Postgres and had little to no experience with actual MS SQL Server use.

Also, the lack of author identity was frowned upon.

Lastly, the conjecture and attitude towards Microsoft lacks some substance.

Conclusion: The author is free to write whatever he likes, but take this resource with a pinch of salt.

I use both Postgres and MS SQL Server professionally and whilst philosophically I prefer Postgres, for practical reasons I truly prefer MS SQL Server, if only because of its excellent development tools.

[thomaskcr]

My biggest frustration with MS is their licensing is infuriating. Doing cleanup during the audit took a ridiculous amount of resources and every company gave us a different answer on what needs to be licensed differing by 1000s of dollars sometimes.

The other is the barrier to entry. I was trying to get NAV2015 working for a demo using some data for a project, I spent at least 20 hours trying to figure out who to pay (Azure comes with it installed but no license -- why not just sell a bundled license into the hourly cost?) -- eventually gave up and set up OpenERP in like 30 minutes, spent 3 hours adding the feature I needed and was done. NAV is unquestionably better for this project, but I'm not going to enter into a support contract with a company just to get a license.

[MichaelGG]

That's neat though. Shop around for the cheapest reseller, let them make the mistakes or miscalculation, enjoy?

I'm guessing it comes down to virtual cores and such, right? Although I'm surprised how many stupid-simple mistakes people make just by not reading even the basics. (Wait MSDN includes several Office keys, so obviously they don't want us to buy Office licenses for administrative assistants.)

[thomaskcr]

See, even you're a bit confused by MSDN -- You're not even supposed to use the MSDN license for your own everyday use is what I've been told. So if you have outlook for email and you're using an MSDN license, that's not correctly licensed. MSDN is ONLY for development. Also it's one MSDN license per developer apparently.

And no because you still get nailed -- it's not like your reseller is the one being audited, it's you.

You're supposed to get CALs for printers accessing MS servers.

Don't ever use an MS server for DHCP, every single client needs a CAL. How am I supposed to even predict that if we allow personal devices on the guest network?

It's beyond frustrating - and the products are great, they just make it impossible to actually ever be in compliance and you need to spend an insane amount of time just handling licenses. It's really the reason I avoid MS as much as possible, and I really love their dev tools (Visual Studio is beyond awesome, I love C#.net) its just too much hassle.

[MichaelGG]

No I'm not confused - I was giving an example of stuff I've heard from clients. MSDN makes it really clear it's for dev not day-to-day ops. But people don't get that.

I'd be surprised if you get "nailed" if a reseller went over a scenario and licensed you. Worst case is if they can prove maliciousness and fine you. If the reseller calculated things and came to a reasonable (but lower) number I'd be surprised if that's gonna really hurt.

Agreed though that MS's licensing is terribly annoying. But it's a lower Total Cost of Ownership, right?!

[thomaskcr]

Ah sorry, yes I was one of those people -- we had like half an office using MSDN licenses. Just didn't know better (they give us 10, we'll buy another MSDN license when we run out!).

[coldtea]

>The last time this article came up the consensus was that the author was pretty biased towards Postgres and had little to no experience with actual MS SQL Server use. Also, the lack of author identity was frowned upon. Lastly, the conjecture and attitude towards Microsoft lacks some substance.

So there was not any substancial critique and responce to the specific points he makes?

[keithwarren]

There was ample breakdown of the article and lots of credible resources pointing towards places he was wrong.

[dorfsmay]

And lack of publication date, what was true in 2010 might not be true in 2015. How do we know which versions he is comparing? Both PostgreSQL and MS SQL make very significant progress every year.

[Aushin]

He says upfront that he's comparing PostgreSQL 9.3 and MS SQL Server 2014

[Someone1234]

Actually he says in the first line of the third paragraph:

> Unless otherwise stated I am referring to PostgreSQL 9.3 and MS SQL Server 2014

Which makes his opinions timeless and gives context. A date on it would be welcome, but just from the software version you can figure out if it applies to you or your scenario.

[dorfsmay]

Thanks, you're right.

I read this months ago, so just went over it very quickly this time, and the first thing I did was to look for a date at the top and bottom.