Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Bible

SQL Server in the Database Market

SQL Server's position in the database market has consistently grown over time. This section discusses some of the primary competition to SQL Server, and what makes SQL a strong choice for data management, business intelligence, and cloud computing along with the strength of the SQL Server community.

SQL Server's Competition

SQL Server competes primarily with two other major database platforms, Oracle and IBM's DB2. Both of these products have existed for longer than SQL Server, but the last four releases of SQL Server have brought them closer together. They are adding features that SQL has had for years and vice versa. Many of the scalability improvements added since SQL 2005 have been directly focused on overtaking the performance and other qualities of these products. Microsoft has succeeded in these releases in besting benchmarks set by many other products both in the relational database platforms as well as in data integration, analytics, and reporting. These improvements, along with the strongest integrated ecosystem, including cloud (Windows Azure SQL Database), portal (SharePoint 2010), and business intelligence make SQL Server the market leader.

Strength of Community

SQL Server has one of the strongest communities of any technology platform. There are many websites, blogs, and community contributors that make up a great ecosystem of support. Some great avenues to get involved with include the following:

• PASS (Professional Association of ...