sacrifice

When it comes to performance, SQL Server's strength—providing many more features than its competitors—is also its weakness. Granted, many of these features are geared toward performance tuning, but being a feature-rich environment means sacrificing something else. In this case, the cost is additional complexity, disk storage, memory requirements, and poorer performance. If you can't afford to support SQL Server with powerful hardware and trained expertise, you should definitely look elsewhere for a DBMS because you likely won’t be happy with the results.