2004 I remember working in a larger enterprise and was forced to use MSSQL. Now... I know there's a lot of 'good' in it, and compared to MySQL at the time, man

2004 I remember working in a larger enterprise and was forced to use MSSQL. Now... I know there's a lot of 'good' in it, and compared to MySQL at the time, many benefits (though many of those benefits were for the admins, not so much the developers in my org). We had a requirement for paginating through records, and the group of MSSQL admins were... flummoxed at the request. "Why would you need to do that? Just use top(X)!" Umm... when there's 48000 records, and you're trying to see records 47000-47100.... wth? They spent days back and forth trying to come up with reusable sprocs with odd combinations of top/reversing/top/sorting - SQL Server 2000 at the time. I'm not sure the rownumber() thing was available at the time. And... there was much grumbling about this 'stupid' request. I was honestly a bit shocked (I was still a bit naive about 'enterprise' folks) that this was such a chore, and not there. We also needed in-place encryption/decryption, which one of the prototypes had with mysql aes_encrypt(), but we had to use MSSQL, so... thousand of dollars later for some db tool, this was available. I know MSSQL has many advantages, and is very powerful in many situations, but MS-first people sometimes are oblivious to 'standard' functionality other products have.