We're a B2B shop migrating to MSSQL, from SQL Anywhere. Managed MSSQL in Azure is fairly easy operationally, especially since we don't have a dedicated DBA and our support staff aren't SQL gurus.

However since we now got the tools for running on both, and experience migrating, we might be moving to PostgreSQL at some point in not too distant future. Managed MSSQL in Azure is not cheap.

If you started on SQL Anywhere, SAP, you were pretty deep in Enterprise sauce so MSSQL make sense.

And "Holy crap, this is not cheap" is why I see plenty of companies transitioning off MSSQL.

We started with SQL Anywhere way before it was SAP. SAP was the primary driver to move away, but it also fits nicely with our customers, some which want to run their own MSSQL instance.

I think this is more your bias, it's also regional as different places in the world seem to use these things way more than other parts. Really quick search shows it's used a LOT outside of the areas you mentioned. The place it's not really used? startups... it's the #3 DB in the world.

Sure, it's #3 but whole point is new installs have mostly stalled and outside companies absolutely mainlining the .Net Framework Kool-Aid, no one is building greenfield on it. I've worked for several .Net Core companies, all of them have either converted or in process of converting away from MSSQL to MySQL flavor or PostGres.

Microsoft is heavily investing in Postgres in fact which is why they bought PostGres sharding company, Citus and looking at commit history on PostGres, they have several employees actively working on it. They also contributed DocumentDB which is Mongo over Postgres.

It will take a long time to die and Microsoft will still continue to do little work on the product and stack your money in their vault while giggling.

Heh. State government is the only place I've encounter MSSQL in the past 10 years.

It's common as the backend to a lot of SMB scale ERP and CRM solutions. But almost all of those run on SQL Express.

I know of a couple of rather fancy, proprietary 2-way radio trunking systems products that use local MS SQL on the back end, to keep track of configs for individual subscriber radios and system configurations for the radio repeaters.

(What's that? Well, if you ever walk into a place like a gigantic oil refinery, you'll see a bunch of people working there. If you look long enough, you'll notice that each of them have an expensive-looking radio ("walkie talkie") on their hip. Some of those radios may be my fault -- and of those that are, there's an MS SQL database that knows exactly how it was programmed. But I didn't pick it; that's just how the system operates.)

Yup, thanks big M for making things fun as usual. I deal with the same thing on the P25 side.

I don't mind Radio Management, per se. It's a nice idea. It just feels broken and internally-disjointed when it isn't falling flat on its face.

We almost got into bits of the P25 side to help service $giant_government_entity's system, but the GTR 8000 training was complete ass. Mostly what we got out of it was long periods of the dude fretting about the clutch job that his Hyundai was in the shop for and talking on the phone about that, interspersed with a repeated slogan of "I was a Navy man. I don't know what makes sense to you, but I do things by memorizing steps instead of understanding how they work."

Sometimes, he'd get around to mentioning some of those steps.

Much waste, very disappoint.

We all very thoroughly failed the test at the end of that week.

An ASTRO Core is a terrifying thing to see.

Yep. Cabinet Vision as of 3 years ago required installing both SQL Server 2016 and 2019, plus 2010-vintage Microsoft Jet database, plus Powershell 2.0, plus .NET 3.5.

It’s completely dominant in its industry and has no real competition. Pricing starts at $200 a month for the most basic, single user setup and goes up (way up) from there.

And no, it doesn’t work on ARM, at all. I tried.

Yep, there is plenty of that type of software, industry niche software that doesn't have market cap to interest competitors, that will require MSSQL and Windows so Microsoft will continue to sell it/develop it.

Which can also run on Linux now.

We are on the outside, for the types of customers we serve it is MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, or some SaaS product that you can only access via GraphQL.

Very seldom I use something like Postegres, last time was in 2018.

This is like saying nobody eats at McDonald’s because they have more competition now. It’s not wrong from a certain perspective but that’s still a huge number of customers.

Sure and likely Windows Server and MSSQL will still exist in 2056 because there will be enough money in it. Hell, AS/400 is still kicking but I'm not sure anyone would consider that anything but legacy.

I've worked for plenty of companies using MsSql.

They have all been dotnet ecosystem, but self hosted rather than Azure

I think the latest versions of SQL Server also run on Linux now.

and it doesn't support NTLM auth afaik! Which is an extra bonus, as I don't remember there being a way to disable it in the windows version