A: (1) Tight integration with Visual Studio. Made for each other.

(2) Intelli-Sense enabled GUI to work with. Sorry, I mean to say they were the first to start Intelli-Sense.

(3) Rich community. Microsoft is expert in marketing. Your head won’t stuck when serious issue arises. You can easily find a trouble-shooter next door.

(4) Easy to scale from a desktop database to a server database. Many people use it on a single PC.

(5) No complexity and virtually doesn’t require a dedicated DBA in most cases.

1. You are given the following relation definitions which describe the world of Sports:
Sportsman (Sid, Sname, Sage, Scountry)
Coach (Cid, Cname, Cage, Ccountry)
Coaches (Cid, Sid, salary)

All id’s age and salaries are of type number, and the rest of the attributes are of type varchar2 (30). A sportsman may have 0 or more coaches, a coach may have 0 or more sportsmen. A sportsman cannot coach himself. Age and salaries are positive. All pairs of (Cid, Sid) must exist in Sportsman and Coach, respectively.
Note: Assume and take appropriate data according to the queries given. Insert at least 6 tuples for each relation in the database.

Formulate the following queries in SQL:

a) Find the names of all sports man whose names begin with the letter ‘S’, ends with the letter ‘e’, and the letter ‘m’ appears in their name.

b) Find the names of sportsmen who are from India and over the age of 23, and have a coach (at least one).

c) Find the names of all coaches who coach a sportsman from their own country and they are not the oldest coaches.

d) Find the names of coaches from Italy who coach more than 2 sportsmen.

e) Find the coaches who do not train a French sportsman.

f) Find the coaches who train a sportsman who is not Indian.

BTW I’m a sql server user/fan myself.

Please take the time to gather some facts and create an objective list, this is just plain subjective reasoning.

1. Easy integration with Microsoft Operating systems.

Hurray. Can we run in on Linux, if our entire infrastructure (application servers, search engine, messaging, etc..) are on Linux – no. How great?

2. East integration with world’s most common database: Spreadsheet, Microsoft excel in particular and power pivot has significantly enhanced its value.

Import a csv is a feature of every database, and the data from each spreadsheet can be expported to csv.

5. Integrated Security (windows authentication): This definitely help streamline server access based on Active directory policies and groups.

See point 1.

9. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS): As compare to other RDMS systems tools, SSMS is the best tool for a developer or a DBA.

Eh, what? I bet they(you) haven’t tried Navicat. Or any other such tool for that matter.

Everything else, like enhanced optimizer, replication, disaster recovery, etc., etc. are available in all RDBMS. And, btw “RDBMS application” sounds a bit odd to my ears — “[..] system application”.

Oh, I just want to mention something – LIMIT everywhere, TOP in MSSQL.

User friendly interface: You might like it, but even I who work almost 100% on Windows still likes tools with configuration files. For a professional who works every day with the system, a text file can be a lot more efficient. I can easily copy the file before I make some changes. I can grep after a value, I can add a single line in my documentation and every admin will understand what I mean. If there’s some shell like bash I can even add a single line you can copy&paste to activate a certain feature. An old fashioned console can be very fast and easy to use, it depends on what you do and it depends on your background.

To me simplicity is if I can execute a simple command instead of having to click around a graphical user interface. But I get that someone doesn’t like that approach. It depends!

Your statements about licensing is rather hard to understand. I actually never understood why there are people working at Microsoft called “Senior License Evangelist”…

SQL Server is definitely a great product but it’s definitely not the best product for everything. A small database like SQLite does have a lot of advantages over SQL Server. And yes, I know there’s SQL Server Express.

If you’re comparing products don’t just write “It’s better”. Do an actual comparison and don’t forget that people have different opinions!

Geeze kids today, seems you wouldn’t recognize a decent rdbms and hosting solution if it hit you over the head, which in fact, if you knew how to use google and actually evaluate the alternatives, it actually does.

Licensing of Interbase, DB2, PostgreSQL, etc. is many times simpler.. and usually less expensive also.

As always, “the best RDBMS” depends on what you want to do with it. Absolutely, SQL Server is the best ever if you are integrating with other MS products.

At my office, SQL Server is “the” tool without question. On my hobby projects at home, I don’t go anywhere near it.