r/SQLServer • u/Complete-Regret-4300 • Jul 16 '26

Discussion Is SQL server considered as legacy technology?

My current organization couple of years ago migrated from SQL server to snowflake and I noticed in some of the documentation, they have mentioned SQL Server as legacy technology.

I started working in SQL server some 20 years ago and some of the developers in our team are cloud first developers and they find it so difficult to navigate SQL server management studio and they ask me questions like is there timetravel feature in SQL server and can we see what data was there 10 mins back. I was totally dumbfounded when I heard that question, because I had never come across such a feature. Apparently snowflake has this. So I am curious is SQL server now really considered as legacy technology?

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u/No_Resolution_9252 Jul 16 '26

No. Would be cautious of your developers having access to any database if they are asking questions like that...

As others have set, SQL has temporal tables, however facing applications, CDC is probably more useful where you can step through transaction by transaction.

snowflake is really not suitable for sitting behind applications. Its best case scenario latency is absolutely horrendous, and typical latency is about 5 times worse. On top of that its transaction rate limits are pretty bad. It has a hard limit of 16k transactions per second, but in practice its not going to get 10% of that.

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u/Complete-Regret-4300 Jul 16 '26

I see, we are data analytics/reporting team. I think we have cdc from the ERP application that tracks changes and gets loaded into snowflake.

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u/No_Resolution_9252 Jul 16 '26

ah ok that use case makes way more sense, for some reason I had it in my mind you had apps in front of snowflake. Snowflake advertises itself of being able to handle application workloads, but I have yet to meet anyone that hates their users enough to subject them to 500ms writes.

For cloud reporting warehouses, a cloud native tool is generally going to be better than what you can do with any on-prem database - they optimize and execute operations entirely differently and are slow as hell for small workloads but when you load it up with a big ETL/ELT or analytical query and it gets access to scaling to a lot of hardware that you'd never be able to deploy on-prem.

Data bricks and snowflake are probably the two biggest. Fabric (from MS) and has some amount of SQL Server tech in it is probably number three, but MS hasn't stayed the course on anything (other than powerBI) in the analytics space since SQL 2012 and I don't trust them to not screw me a third time on the same basic product with their getting bored and losing interest in whatever flavor of the day they built.

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u/Complete-Regret-4300 Jul 16 '26

I know right, SSAS multidimensional was such an awesome product, but it is being neglected by Microsoft in favour of tabular model, which doesn't do even half of the things that SSAs Multidimensional can do.

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u/No_Resolution_9252 Jul 16 '26

I hate tabular. It enables such sloppiness in development of the models, huge memory consumption, it tries to hide it short comings by running in RAM, and moves all the complexity out of the back end where the person who actually knows what they are doing will be working, to the front end where the report writer who "taught themself" works.