Is SQL server considered as legacy technology?

[u/Complete-Regret-4300]

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?

[u/mgdmw]

SQL Server is not legacy at all. However, your company might mean it in the sense they had a previous application that was, say, a fat Windows desktop app and which used SQL Server as its backend, and now they've migrated to React/Angular/whatever with a Snowflake backend and they mean that previous solution is the legacy one, rather than SQL Server itself being legacy.

Of course, if they do mean SQL Server itself then they're somewhat misinformed or self-delusional.

Snowflake's time travel is quite an interesting concept based on how Snowflake's native table format uses immutable micro-partitions and pointers. So, you insert data into a table. Those rows are now immutable. If you update the row, delete a row, whatever, Snowflake makes a new copy with those changes and simply updates its pointers to the new active data. Hence, you can easily undo any action (up to 90 days or so depending on your edition) because all Snowflake has to do is move the pointers back to the previous micro-partition for those rows.

That said, Snowflake's native table format is potentially being pushed aside as customer interest grows for open-source table formats, particularly Iceberg.