Experiences of SQL Server 7

[J Staniforth]

As we are evaluating SQL Server 7 I wondered whether the conference could give their experiences with this product.
I have not had resounding success with the Upsizing Wizard from Access 2000 and the Enterprise manager seems painfully slow. At this time I am prepared to accept that it is more my fault than MS - but what is your experience?
Am I right in thinking that anything more than a SELECT query has to be hand coded as SQL in Stored Procedures - or is there some designer in Access2000 that does it graphically?
Over to you....

[Clunietp]

You can pretty much use any valid ANSI SQL statement for your inserts/updates/deletes without any problems

SQL 7 enterprise manager has graphical table and view creators (similar to MS Access), along with plenty of other wizards for the newbie admins

You need to learn T-SQL for the stored procedures

Overall, I've been very happy with SQL 7. It is pretty much self tuning and the manager is much easier to use (in my opinion) than DB2, Oracle, or SQL 6.5

ADO also seems built for SQL 7, as the provider supports just about every ADO function, and the performance is great

OK, enough marketing for me....

[JasonGS]

Ive used Borland's Interbase, Oracle and SQL 7; I would have to say that SQL 7 is the easiest to configure and maintain. I would also agree that when ADO was developed, that SQL Server was in definatley mind.

One of my larger databases (hosted by SQL 7) with anywhere from 10 to 50 concurrent users of a VB DB client sustained excellent performance.

When I evaluated SQL 7, I developed a VB program that spawned 250 ADO connections and they all issued UPDATE statements on fields in multiple tables; I got EXCELLENT response times.

I work for an ISP, and we have developed applications which add and update fields in a table at almost real time (call center agent statistics) and SQL 7 handles the load well (Oracle performed a little bit better though).

If your interested in more specific performance details, contact me at the jsmith@idgaf.net

[J Staniforth]

Thanks all,
I was feeling a bit despondant and being to feel that I had been conned by the MS marketing machine.
Anyone with any hints and tips I would be most grateful - especially in the realms of upsizing from Access as many of our programmer are not confident SQL coders and would find it a real bane to give up a graphical SQL builder as Access has.

Regards,
John.