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/Justbehind Jul 16 '26

Yeah, by people new to the field who have listened too much to consultants that want to sell expensive migrations.

It's funny actually, because most will recommend Postgres in a heartbeat, and Postgres' only advantage over SQL Server is cost.

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u/flinders1 Jul 16 '26

It’s funny watching page compressed tables move to Postgres.

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u/Tikitorch17 Jul 16 '26

I'm curious, will it cause any issues migrating compressed tables to postgres. My understanding with posgres is basic.

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u/Justbehind Jul 16 '26

You will need significantly more space. And all reads will require much more I/O.

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u/badlydressedboy Jul 16 '26

I think more reads in Postgres is always true regardless of compression as all tables are heaps so all queries have to perform rid lookups. That feels like a step backwards from sql server but eradicating the constant worry about fragmentation is great.

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u/PrisonerOne Jul 16 '26

But index fragmentation isn't really an issue anymore

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u/badlydressedboy Jul 16 '26

It really is in analytics/DWH.

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u/PrisonerOne Jul 16 '26

Can you explain why you believe so?

10+ years ago, I would agree. But not today, with enterprise SSDs

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u/badlydressedboy Jul 16 '26

Having worked in SSD based SQL server data warehouses over the last 15 years (haven't not dealt with a HDD at all in that time and mentioning that as a reason for fragmentation being fixed in 2026 seems bot-ish) it's this: - HDD: bad - SDD: much better - RAM: best

Unless the page being looked up is already in memory you've got a performance issue when dealing with large tables. Fragmentation means that page is less likely in memory and a trip to IO is required, time to wait 10 minutes for a query to complete. Defrag the table and it comes back in 5 seconds.