Microsoft SQL Server vs Mode: Which is a better fit?

Lew N.: Hi, my name is Lew, I am the Director of Information Technology for Young's Plant Farm. We're an annual and perennial grower supplier for big box retail stores, and I give Microsoft SQL Server a five out of five review. Okay. We chose SQL Server as we shifted away from some of the more mid-range systems that had built-in databases and we also looked at IBM DB2 and we just were very happy with the interface and how well Microsoft SQL Server ported across all of our different servers and applications. The primary reason the value-added reseller that provides the vertical system for growers uses a SQL Server database as its primary database, so we were familiar with SQL for that. As we were shifting into the data warehousing mode and developing our own internal data warehouse, we chose to use the same platform because we were familiar with it and we liked the way it worked, and we knew it was powerful. As with Microsoft products, the installs and the look and fill of the product are pretty much the same across all of their suite of products. SQL Server was very simple to install, didn't really have any licensing issues or anything like that, so we got it up and running. As far as the installation for our data warehouse, we just started creating tables and setting it up the way we needed and morphed and adjusted and enhanced from there. Just getting started was very simple, and from there, we have launched it into the powerful tool that has become for us. If you're looking at a database platform to do your own in-house data warehouse and your own application development, linking with other Microsoft Power, BI power apps, products like that, SQL Server is definitely the product to go with. It is easy to set up, very secure, and very portable to other platforms, very interfaceable to other platforms.

Rohan V.: My name is Rohan. I'm a software engineer at Lyft. And I use Mode Report just for general analytics to understand our data better. And I would give it a rating of a five. I use Mode report at Lyft for different data purposes. It might be for visualizations to better understand our data sets and to be able to get better visibility into the data that we have to understand it. At a higher level, it may be to be able to generate reports, to be able to share with other stakeholders in order for us to be able to better inform them on the data that we do have. Or it may be to even just do playground reporting. Just like being able to investigate data on an ad hoc basis to be able to figure out something on the fly. For all these different purposes, Mode report has been very helpful. I would say that the biggest thing that I like about Mode is just how easy it is to use and how nice it looks. I think the combination of both makes it a very accessible platform to be able to do anything of the use cases that I mentioned before. The fact that visually it has a lot of customization aspects to it, to be able to make it feel how you want it to. And then the fact that all the features are very self-evident, very well documented, and usually pretty intuitive to be able to look at and understand how to interact with it makes it a very engaging solver to use. The two things that I suppose has the most room for growth with regards to Mode that I dislike at the moment is the use of the collections feature and the UI for being able to navigate different data sources. For a collections, being able to organize by maybe teams or purposes is an important feature that I think should definitely be there. But I think the way that I'm navigating it feels not as fluid and not as smooth as the other aspect of Mode. It feels very ad hoc, search driven. Instead of being able to view the collections as a whole, I have to explicitly find it, which only comes from having the pre-knowledge that it exists. And for the data sources, having different engines or different data sources to be able to query data on when I'm using the Python notebooks, or being able to use the data to actually get the sets from, it tends to not have much information about its availability, about if it's actually able to be used with the table in reference. And that tends to mean that you have to have, again, a lot of pre-knowledge on the actual data that you're using to be able to know if the query engine would work for it.