MS should make windows free and just charge for services. I’d love it if they made SQLServer free (sans support or add paid support that actually is good not outsourced) too but that’s a pipe dream.
Windows is pretty much already free if you are not a business. Just download Windows10 ISO from MS and install it on your home PC.
You will not be prompt to activate it and it will not ever lock itself. Only thing you cannot do is change your "Personalisation Settings" e.g. remove stupid "recomendations" on your Start, change desktop background etc.. Also you will have small overlay on bottom left corner saying "Windows is not activated" or smth.
Mssql is significantly more expensive to run than postgres, Mongo, dynmodb, or mysql when you need a real sql server. This is true for both self hosted and cloud solutions.
Dynmodb in AWS offers 25gb free. That's twelve times the storage without charging you a dime.
Dynamo db is not cheap at all. Writes are expensive and the structure of Dynamo is far from flexible and very limited in regards to querying. I don’t know what the usecase is for it.
Dynamo db handles burst traffic (scaling up and down on server count) better than mssql. Dynamo also handles big data better than sql.
The last time I tried (2015) no amount of indexing or sharding was allowing for decent performance on joins across tables with 300+ million rows in sql server. I've seen dynmodb used in map reduce functions with more data.
Dynamo also doesn't completely suck at typical transcational work, and it's convient to have one datasource across the warehouse and application layers.
When I worked in Australia we had a client with ~1.5tb database in SQL Server, largest main table was about 2.5b records. Had no problem returning joined records in low ms times. Wouldn't be good if it had really high traffic but we wrote about ~1-2m records per day into the tables without issue reading it out.
SQL Server can perform. But requires a lot of massaging.
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We tried using DynamoDB for logging, not sure why but the team had trouble with document sizes, write limits, in the end it was growing and going to cost more than SQL Server, was replaced with logging to PostgreSQL with much more flexibilty and runs on a t2.micro instance without issue.
