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.