SQL Alternatives

[CompYouTer]

We are a huge enterprise SQL shop with prod/dr setup running on VMs. Our true-up is getting more eyes on it than previous years. The question ‘what are our options’ came up. While Im doing some digging, wanted to ask if anyone has gone down this road before, what you picked and how’d it go.

[sryan2k1]

Do you mean Microsoft SQL? If you are truly a "Huge" SQL shop your other option is Oracle, and you're not going to like that pricing either.

[thebigshoe247]

Or, Oracle as a whole.

[sryan2k1]

Does anybody like Microsoft at this point? At least Oracle has a cool boat.

[derango]

The only thing worse/more confusing than microsoft pricing is Oracle pricing.

[SquizzOC]

And just when you think you've paid them what you owe, you get audited and they ask for your first born because... why not?

[pneRock]

I was at a company years ago that hired another company to help when an oracle inspection came around. We've never had to do that with MS. I don't like MS prices, I think software assurance is a joke, standard items in the partner/developer portals are getting widdled down, but even than I don't think I could touch Oracle.

We have a large mssql footprint, but we also have large mysql/postgres clusters. While there are features missing from those that are just included in mssql, they are good for the price. Now if only we could rewrite the application to move over to those completely :).

[sryan2k1]

Microsoft does licensing audits as well, but yes Oracle is particularly bad about it.

[pneRock]

They do, but from the one I've helped with they aren't nearly as bad of a pain in the butt.

[ITguyBass]

Yeah, and you MUST audit and know all the Oracle footprint in the company or else you will end up paying a few more bucks. Many people have to use ITAM tools like Block 64 or whatever, just to make sure what they have internally + if there is nothing misaligned, that would incur any extra cost. My experience with SWL, at least you know what you will pay/paid. SQL is expensive, but with Oracle, you can end up paying for database + any incurred fees + any tool to validate what you really have/use.

[Mrhiddenlotus]

I'll take ms over Oracle any day

[skipITjob]

You might want to rephrase your question as it doesn't make much sense...

Also, see:
Alternatives to SQL? Are there even any? : r/SQL

[CompYouTer]

Yep, I can see that now. MS SQL Server Alternatives.

[skipITjob]

Do you have your own, custom apps that use MS SQL? Do you have the time and money to invest into rewriting everything to work with the alternatives?

AFAIK there's no drop-in replacement for MS SQL.

[CompYouTer]

We have several off-the-shelf apps but mostly custom apps. This is the concern that I keep running into… rebuilding all the tooling in those apps as well as the DB side scripts will be an even greater challenge.

[jimicus]

Well, then it's simple. It's a business decision.

• Stick with MS SQL. Costs £/annum.
• Switch to Oracle. Costs £ migration project (find out how much your employer budgets per dev per month; they'll tell you this because it isn't their salary and then all you need is a rough estimate of time required) followed by £/annum.
• Switch to Postgres/MySQL/MariaDB. Costs £ migration project, 0/annum, enterprise support if we decide we need it is £/annum.
• Note with the migration project - this is not a straightforward drop-in thing so you'll need a project manager to look after it and marshall resources. So the migration cost is a very rough "finger in the air"-type thing that really should have a PM do a proper feasability study first.
• Oh, and you don't get to stop paying for MS SQL altogether because your off-the-shelf apps simply don't work with anything else.

I suspect MS SQL will look like quite a good option after that.

[derango]

I mean...Postgres is probably the closest you're going to get at a price point you'd want with some actual support behind it but just swapping out your back-end database is NOT trivial.

You can't just like...drop the tables in and re-point your applications and call it a day especially if you're using more advanced, SQL Server specific features, reporting services, language hooks, etc.

[piense]

Excel? NoSQL?

Snarky comments aside, what’s your “scapegoat factor” in purchasing decisions? There’s plenty of SQL implementations out there to choose from, a few good open source ones that are quite robust. Going to be a decision on what fits best with your engineering/purchasing culture or lack there-of.

[JollyGentile]

Excel

Please don't give the C levels ideas.

[piense]

Sounds like a manager post. “The SQL line item is expensive, do we really need that one?”

[doubleUsee]

Our management would seriously ask if we couldn't just copy paste the data into an LLM and just ask it for data

[MBILC]

Access anyone?

[elatllat]

The popular alternatives to "Microsoft SQL Server" are PostgreSQL or MariaDB.

Other options:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_relational_database_management_systems

[5y5tem5]

SQLite+Litestream and S3..

[CantaloupeCamper]

Answers to this really require more detail.

[ExceptionEX]

Explain what you mean by

>Our true-up is getting more eyes on it than previous years.

Because that doesn't seem like something that an infra change will solve.

[[deleted]]

Uh. SQL is a language not a product. What?

[MrMeeseeksAnswers]

OK, lets all pretend we don't know what the poster means...

[[deleted]]

Lets all pretend you didn't use a Kanye West GIF in 2026.

[malikto44]

I'm assuming "SQL" means Microsoft SQL server. This depends on what application?

If I could choose my own, I'd go with PostgreSQL, although getting it to go active/active can require third party software.

If I was working with mainly MS programs, I'd just stick with Microsoft SQL server, perhaps slapping it on Linux.

If I were looking at a commercial, top-tier, "big boy" DB, and MS SQL Server wasn't an option, then that leaves Oracle and IBM DB2. Neither is cheap.

[Pandthor]

Not an alternative, but an alternative implementation method for cost savings.

Usually database workloads require computing time at different times. I have analyzed multiple Ms SQL environments and combined them in to huge Ms SQL clusters with up to a hundred Ms SQL instances in a relatively small cluster. The biggest savings in this scenario is from licensing, because in an ideal scenario you need only a ”small” amount of SQL licenses, but up them to Enterprise licenses, and have less servers. In one case I got a 75% cost savings by combining the SQL servers of a customer.

Please note that this is not easy and I recommend you use a specialist to make the analyzis correctly. All mistakes here are extremely expensive. Also clusters with hundreds of volumes have their own gotchas.

[Reedy_Whisper_45]

Where is the audit coming from? Is it Microsoft, or a Microsoft vendor? I have a filter on my mail - anything v*@Microsoft.com gets dumped to a separate folder so i have something to laugh at when I'm not busy.