I have been on SQL Server since 1997. Until then I worked with PowerBuilder’s WatCom, Informix and Oracle.

I got pissed off at Oracle because I had a fixed price contract and five people on payroll, and there was a showstopper problem with Oracle and their technical support took over a week to return my call and another week to suggest a circumvention. I took a bath on that.

A few weeks later I was doing a for me-critical project for Intel and I ran into a problem with SQLS 6.5 accessed from VB5 under MTS. (MTS was Microsoft Transaction Server, then the hottest Microsoft technology.)

I reported the problem to Microsoft. They called me back in half an hour and promised a fix. They posted that fix for me on their bulletin board – no Microsoft support Web site back then – in 40 hours. Then they called me and the support tech explained that the problem was caused by VB-to-MTS interfaces that erroneously set locks for any SELECT query and because it was an error, they were not lifted and had to expire. And the tech told me that no one on the MTS team went home for two nights.

I have been on SQL Server ever since and I never again touched Oracle.

On some projects I am using Azure blobs and tables, and for large volumes (“Big Data”) I use Cosmos with its SQL-based SCOPE.