Can SQL server do everything that SAS can do? Which do you think is better for programming?

Question

My boss wants to move to SQL server becuase it is free on our company computers vs. SAS which we pay for. Is this free version that comes on the computer any good or will we need to buy additional software for the SQL Server to be of any real use to use. We currently do a lot of programming in SAS. I'm wary of any software that's free because it's usually worthless without some expensive upgrade.

Answer 1

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) produced by Microsoft. Its primary query language is Transact-SQL, an implementation of the ANSI/ISO standard Structured Query Language (SQL) used by both Microsoft and Sybase. SQL Server is commonly used by businesses for small- to medium-sized databases, but the past five years have seen greater adoption of the product for larger enterprise databases.

As SQL server workloads increase in complexity, sub-optimal code naturally takes shape and bottlenecks inevitably appear. If not detected, these problems may grow into larger, slowing database operations and letting your customers experience significant lags or downtimes.

Identifying the problem areas quickly is crucial, but in reality, troubleshooting T-SQL code in a production environment can be more difficult than expected. Whatever method you choose, solving these problems may end up costing more time, money, and effort than you are prepared to deal with.

Now that you've placed your enterprise data on your SQL server you will want SAS's SAS/ACCESS 9.1 Supplement for Microsoft SQL Server (SAS/ACCESS for ...Relational Databases) to analyze your data.

Answer 2

You can also prevent some well-known issues by properly creating your dB and maintaing it from time to time.

Some well-known issues are slowness that can bt attributed because of bad (or not well-thoughtout) Primary Key Identity Keys); not having adaquate constraints in place; and neglecting to create a dB-level restarints on columns.

You should also (especially if your dB is high in requests) check your error logs and shrink them accordingly. The log files grow vastly and take up space. The reccomended space is 2MB.