SQL Server on a virtual Windows server is like the de facto set up within the non-IT-but-still-kind-of-technical groups of large organizations. There's just a ton of UI tools built for it and it's a nice transition from Access to something more robust.
But it means having a separate windows-server team set up to handle builds and all that. The crappy thing is that the rest of IT uses Linux or Unix based OSs for their software, so Cygwin ends up getting installed on most Win Servers to open them up to the NFS shares that drive most of the data movement. I could see this being pretty huge to be able to migrate the various SQL server versions and Win OS versions over to Linux and ditch the need for dual environments while still supporting a RDBMS that most of the business is comfortable using and has tons of legacy data and apps built against them.
But.. yea I agree. If you just need a database, drop Postgres on a linux box and role. It's free and there is a huge community. If you've got the money and need something managed for you with support built in and lots of horsepower then go with something like Teradata. SQL Server feels like the Sears/k-mart of RDBMS. I'll just go to Walmart, thank you very much.
But it means having a separate windows-server team set up to handle builds and all that. The crappy thing is that the rest of IT uses Linux or Unix based OSs for their software, so Cygwin ends up getting installed on most Win Servers to open them up to the NFS shares that drive most of the data movement. I could see this being pretty huge to be able to migrate the various SQL server versions and Win OS versions over to Linux and ditch the need for dual environments while still supporting a RDBMS that most of the business is comfortable using and has tons of legacy data and apps built against them.
But.. yea I agree. If you just need a database, drop Postgres on a linux box and role. It's free and there is a huge community. If you've got the money and need something managed for you with support built in and lots of horsepower then go with something like Teradata. SQL Server feels like the Sears/k-mart of RDBMS. I'll just go to Walmart, thank you very much.