MS SQL Server still has a few things up its sleeve which can be valuable in specific cases: 1. Incrementally updated materialized views (in MS SQL Server, thes

MS SQL Server still has a few things up its sleeve which can be valuable in specific cases: 1. Incrementally updated materialized views (in MS SQL Server, these are called 'indexed views'). 2. SQL Server Management Studio is better than anything I've seen elsewhere. 3. Reporting and analytics (SSRS/SSAS) built in. These are actually pretty good, but not the approach I would recommend. 4. Very solid clustering (I haven't used PostgreSQL's clustering, so this point might be out of date). The license fees are steep (not as steep as Oracle's...) though, so you've got to really want those features. I think report builders tools miss the sweet spot. Instead, build the specific reports that your business needs. Or, do a regular export to flat files (tab delimited causes fewest problems) and let people build what they need in Excel/R/whatever. Or both. In practice, I try SQLite first, and fall back to Postgres if I need concurrent writes.