My experience at the time was that it was perceived as not serious enough and lacking important features. If my memory isn't very bad, I believe as late as 2000 SQL Server still only supported AFTER triggers.

In my experience in the late 90s and early 00s, besides Oracle and Sybase, DB/2 and Informix were also regarded as good. Oracle was considered the best though.

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minkeymaniac 3 days ago | parent [-]

2000 for sure had instead of triggers.. I used them :-)

	▲	fipar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the clarification, I guess my memory is very bad after all! :) Do you remember if that was a recent addition? Full disclosure: I was quite the newbie back then and most of what I "new" about SQL Server was what the more experienced coworkers told me. This was a very IBM-biased place so I'm not surprised they would have stuck to some old shortcoming, like people who still talk about bad MySQL defaults that have been changed for at least 10 years. Up until that job (which was my second Actual Formal Job), all my DB experience had been with either dBase (I think III plus or IV) and access, so this was a whole new world with me. It was through MS SQL Server that a colleague taught me about backups and recovery, after I ran an update in prod but forgot to include the where clause ... :)