[MichaelGG]

HA and clustering. MSSQL makes this dead easy. Point and click (and it'll display the script for you to learn/reuse) and you're done. Async, sync, HA (with automatic fail over), mirroring, several types of replication - and it just works and is easy. If PG ever ships with an out-of-the-box shared nothing system, yee haw! Maybe they could package up DRDB and heartbeat into one easy script and monitoring system or something.

I hate how MSSQL has gone back on their word to let customers benefit from CPU enhancements. They mocked Oracle for charging by type and core... And now they do the same.

Also, multiple result sets was a sorely missed feature when porting stuff to PG. But record types made up for it.

Of course now, the dominating factor for a lot of people is "Will a hosting provider (Azure, AWS, Google) just run this for me, automatically giving me perfect backups and restore and HA?" SQL Azure, as I understand, not only does backups, but allows you to restore to arbitrary points in time. Sure it's just keeping txlogs, but that sounds hot when sold like that. For many cases, I can see ditching the privacy issues of "cloud" to get those features with zero capex or management overhead.

[glogla]

> SQL Azure, as I understand, not only does backups, but allows you to restore to arbitrary points in time.

It does, but they take about hour to hour. Restore takes about that much time. Changing performance level of DB takes similar time.

I'm not sure hot quick Amazon or Google is, but I know lot of ops guys who are sorely disappointed by Azure slowness.

[MichaelGG]

True. Azure is slow slow slow. Even their new portal is just laggy (JS/layout overload). But the service, yikes! Create a new VM, wait minutes. Then find out it failed. Or try to add a port mapping, and wait a minute, unable to do another operation cause one is in progress. It's infuriating. And the VMs take forever to start. And the SSD options are late, under performing and downright janky (they actually tell you to do RAID on the SSDs, since they cannot figure out how to scale storage for you.)

I tried Google Compute Engine on a whim and I'm totally in love (despite a deep distrust of Google). Everything is fast. VMs load in seconds. And it's simple - no inane UI, no crazy leftover bits from being a PaaS. No idiotic design for SSD. And as a kicker, it's half the price for compute. Oh, and SSH client right there in the portal? It's such a small thing but really made me happy.

It's just that Google doesn't do startup outreach and give us cash and court us. Unless you're in an "established" incubator or yc or something. Whereas MS is super friendly and does everything they can.