In most scenarios, end users aren't hitting SSRS' interface directly: The product offers a robust web service that is an excellent way of add very rich, capable

In most scenarios, end users aren't hitting SSRS' interface directly: The product offers a robust web service that is an excellent way of add very rich, capable reporting to your own application. The comment about "thrown together by an intern" seems suspect (though not as much as criticizing SQL Server for defaulting to data integrity. If ever there was a non-complaint, that is it). I've been using SQL Server since 6.5, and generally find the toolset to be excellent, and anything other than "thrown together" (quite contrary, the product moves far slower than I would prefer). They both have their place. In SQL Server land the things that they limit to enterprise edition generally are functions that only really benefit data warehouses (partitioning and compression being two of the most obvious), and given that they know that the people who use data warehouses tend to have warehouses of cash, it comes with a cost. Worth noting that SQL Server has had clustered indexes forever -- psql still has a rather hacked variant of it -- along with materialized views. Both are of tremendous value to web developers. Far more valuable than the default transaction isolation level.