I work with both on a daily basis and there is a mile of difference. Yes I can accomplish whatever I want in sql server but there are so many small things that could improve.
Some of other pet peevees are: You can't use a lot of left joins, it slows down the query dramatically. If there is only one to one relation, use subselects instead.
Thou shall not do queries like this: select foo into baz from bar where fooid not in (select fooid from bar) They are the death of the engine.
And many "unwritten rules" like that.
Postgres just accepts the queries and run them..
We are on SQL server 2014. I have had a query go from 2-3 hours down to 7 minutes by replacing left joins with subselects within the query for instance (and yes all the indices are in place as recommended by sql server query planer)
The one with a insert based on a query on the same table I have never managed to run at all and I have to use a temporary table as an intermediary instead.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/psssql/2010/09/01/slow-quer...
Microsoft doesn't need to make SQL Server look like MySQL. Quite the other way around.
And it's very useful in a ton of situations which is why so many other SQL dialects have added it. It's not like SQL Server is completely standards compliant so I'd rather have the functionality then have to use MERGE because it's "standard".
