Database Reference
In-Depth Information
18.9 Shortcomings of MS SQL Server
SQL Server represents a huge effort by Microsoft to develop and market a top quality
product. Whether the company will succeed in this venture is a bit too early to tell; we will
have to wait and see. There are however, a few areas of concern as summarized below:
Support Only for Microsoft Windows:
Almost all Windows
operating systems provide support for SQL Server. If you have
anything other than Microsoft Windows as your operating
system platform, however, you will have to forego using this
product, and instead look to another RDBMS vendor. It is
obvious why Microsoft has taken this course of action, but it
would be nice to have the ability to install the product on other
operating systems. Platform independence or some semblance
of it would certainly add credence to MS SQL Server, as it
competes in the DBMS industry.
No Native
Load Balancing Capabilities:
SQL Server provides
any built-in support for load balancing.While it is possible
to achieve a "load-balanced" solution with horizontal data
portioning, this is not true load balancing. The DBMS provides
no logic that analyses the load on one server and then passes
the request to another based on the results of the analysis. This
does not mean that load balancing cannot be achieved with
SQL Server; it can be achieved via a third party solution such as
Cisco's Content Services Switch.
No Version Control on Database Objects:
SQL Server
provides no versioning support of stored procedures, views,
or even any Data Definition Language (DDL). You have to
script your database and objects, and then use a product such
as Visual SourceSafe (VSS) to version the scripts. This is not
good, particularly if you have developers who come along and
change the structure slightly, without updating the external
source control repository.
Poor Performance and Configuration Out of the Box:
Most
DBAs know that to improve performance of your RDBMS, you
should separate your program, data, and transaction log files
onto physically separate disk drives. With SQL Server, you can
split the data and program files from each other at installation
time, but the transaction log files are installed by default with
the data partition. This results in poor performance.
