Someone ask Microsoft what does it feel to be bested by an open source project on their very own cloud platform!!! Lol.

doodlesdev 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They don't care. Azure has a revenue higher than GCP, losing only to AWS. It's Microsoft's new baby, and they love it, no matter what you want to run there. Also, they're still the 4th largest company by market cap.

Honestly, only us nerds in Hacker News care about this kind of stuff :) (and that's why I love it here).

edit: also, the article cites OpenAI did adopt Azure Cosmos DB for new stuff they want to shard. Still shows how far you can take PostgreSQL though.

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bdcravens 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That ship sailed a long time ago, as Microsoft has offered Linux VMs in Azure for 14 years, and today, about 2/3 of VMs running there are Linux. In the public cloud era, owning the infrastructure and customer base is far more important than licenses.

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DLA 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And the same for Linux boxes on Azure - they dominate Windows servers by a huge margin.

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beoberha 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you saying this because OpenAI didnt choose SQL Server?

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csto12 13 hours ago | parent [-]

In 2026 is SQL Server ever the answer?

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bzmrgonz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

My sentiments exactly. Anyone at the low side of scale thinking about MS SQL, should seriously do a current survey of things in the dbms space.. there is absolutely no NEED to pay for dbms in 2026. Those old dinosours only still exist, because of the data hijacking nature of past db designs and coding. Everybody and their grandmother were obfuscating code and designs in order to bake in customer loyalty and repetitive patronage. Those old projects are keeping the lights on at proprietary DB Inc. AT the high end of things, you're gonna need db engineers, and if you get yourself Microsoftie hammersharks disguised as professional engineers, they gonna see everything as a nail.

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Tostino 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It really is a good database. Give it lots of room. If you can distribute your workload on multiple machines though, you can't beat Postgres' licencing terms vs SQL Server.

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tormeh 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Why is it a good database? Integration with Entra? I've heard arguments in favor of Oracle DB, but I've never heard anything good about MSSQL besides integration with the MS ecosystem.

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Tostino 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The SQL Server query planner is head and shoulders above what Postgres offers in the types of optimizations it will apply to your queries. It also properly caches query plans.

It offers heap tables, as well as index organized tables depending on what you need.

The protocol supports running multiple queries and getting multiple resultsets back at once saving some round-trips and resources.

Also supports things like global temp tables, and in memory tables, which are helpful for some use cases.

The parallelism story for a single query is still stronger with SQL Server.

I'm sure I could think of more, but it's been a few years since I've used it myself and I've forgotten a bit.

It is a good database. I just wouldn't use it for my startup. I could never justify that license cost, and how it restricts how you design your infrastructure due to the cost and license terms.

	▲	bzmrgonz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		TBF, there's a price to be paid for speed on threads... no isolation, lower tolerance to failures, complex synchronization, painful debugging.

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beoberha 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s kind of my point. They’re not really in competition. I bet they’d have an easier time with this scale if they were on SQL Server, but obviously that migration isn’t happening and startups don’t reach for it for many reasons.

	▲	everfrustrated 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The software licencing of 50 read replicas alone would make sqlserver a non-starter

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esjeon 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Azure offers Postgres “DBaaS”, so I’m pretty sure they are no where near that stage. It’s more likely that we should watch out for the Microsoft E-E-E strategy.

	▲	bzmrgonz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Amen to that.. those tripple-E bastards are likely to use that playbook again. Best advise is to seek fertile grounds where freedom grows. I can't wait for Europe's cloud offering, I believe they're gonna serve as the middle ground between greedy tech-bros and china's fake free as in free beer products. Pack up your bags IT HOBBITS, we're moving to middle earth.