Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. It supports transaction processing, data warehousing, analytics and machine learning. SQL Server runs on Windows and Linux.
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database relational-database sql data-warehousing analytics machine-learning

Microsoft SQL Server: Relational Database Management System for Transaction Processing & Analytics

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. It supports transaction processing, data warehousing, analytics and machine learning. SQL Server runs on Windows and Linux.

What is Microsoft SQL Server?

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Microsoft. It is used for storing, retrieving, managing and analyzing data. SQL Server supports both online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing workloads. Key features include:

  • Support for structured, semi-structured and unstructured data
  • In-Memory OLTP for faster transaction processing
  • Columnstore indexes for fast data warehouse queries
  • Advanced analytics with machine learning and R/Python integration
  • High availability with failover clustering
  • Security features like data masking, encryption and auditing

SQL Server runs on Windows Server and Linux platforms in on-premises data centers as well as on major cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. It comes in different editions supporting various capabilities, performance levels and scale. SQL Server utilizes a client-server architecture centralized around a relational database engine.

Microsoft SQL Server Features

Features

  1. Relational database management system
  2. Transaction processing
  3. Data warehousing
  4. Analytics
  5. Machine learning
  6. High availability
  7. Disaster recovery
  8. Security
  9. Scalability

Pricing

  • Subscription-Based

Pros

Wide platform and OS support (Windows, Linux, containers)

Mature and feature-rich

Strong performance and scalability

Built-in high availability and disaster recovery

Powerful analytics and machine learning capabilities

Integrates well with other Microsoft products and Azure cloud

Cons

Can be complex to manage

Limited use of open source components

Expensive licensing for advanced editions


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