January 21, 2016 at 1:36 pm
larsjessenhh (1/21/2016)
If you had ever the fun to deal with the advanced quantum mechanics of oracle licensing you're really happy with the 'all inclusive' approach of sql server.
Have you come across the bit where the licencing guys aren't allowed to advise on features you might need to include in your licence and the sales people aren't allowed to talk about licences.
January 21, 2016 at 1:44 pm
The editions are just away of charging what the market will bear. It's like discount coupons. It let's a company broaden its potential customer base with and artificial discriminator.
M$ licences were vague in certain respects and subject to interpretation particularly with regard to multiplexing. I found the M$ interpretation varied depending on how close the licencing staff were to their annual bonus
January 22, 2016 at 7:16 am
David.Poole (1/21/2016)
...I found the M$ interpretation varied depending on how close the licencing staff were to their annual bonus
Yes, as with any major purchase like automobiles or realestate, it may be helpful to acquire or renew software licensing in the month of December.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
January 22, 2016 at 7:33 am
We can get quite a good price on standard edition licenses, but Enterprise edition is still expensive. Of course, if you want to set up a failover cluster for your SQL Servers, you will need twice as many cores licenced so the increase in cost is not linear.
So, managers try to save money by only buying Standard licences for key systems, which are then brittle because they have no failover capability. When it fails however, it is the fault of the DBA who is managing the system, and not the manager who failed to spec. the machines and licenses appropriately.
I'm sure this is the same in many industries.
January 25, 2016 at 12:46 am
In my experience, the choice of RDBMS is a management decision (and often a senior management decision). DBAs and technical people are hired knowing this. It is rare that DBAs or technical people are asked for their professional opinion on the matter. The decision has been made.
With this in mind, it is the role of the DBA to make explicitly clear to management what the edition can do and the licence allows. If SQL Server Standard edition is picked and partitioning is required, management must be informed, otherwise the poor DBAs are on a hiding to nothing. Now, it might be that the DBA has been hired for that very purpose, namely to get more out the RDBMS than it was designed for and it is surely a task for some to relish.
As far as I am concerned, licencing and the cost of licences is matter for management. My job is to get the RDBMS to perform as efficiently and securely as possible without a loss of data (and to be able to get it up and running should disaster strike). If they don't pay for the business needs, then they have chosen poorly. If they can't (or won't) pay for the Enterprise edition, and EE is required, then I can do my best but I can't promise what is scarcely possible.
February 2, 2016 at 2:32 pm
A couple things drive me nuts about how they do licensing now.
First, the list price scares people away while no one actually pays that much. If you are paying that much, call up your sales rep and see what they can do for you.
Second, you can save a TON of money by doing Server + CAL for Standard, but then you own all these licenses that can't be transferred into Enterprise.
Say you have 100 employees / devices, so you buy 100 CALs at list for $200 each. Then you install SQL Standard on 15 servers for $900 each. You paid $33,500, even if you're running 16 cores on each server.
If you would have installed it on those 15 servers with just core licensing of $1,800 with a minimum of 4 cores per server, you would have paid $108,000.
It's hard to argue that you should pay $70,000 more just in case you decided you want Enterprise later, so you're forced to go with Server+CAL. However, none of that price is applicable to the price for Enterprise, so instead of Enterprise at list prices being $5,200 more ($7,000 - $1,800) per core, it's a full $7,000 per core more, and management is leaning even stronger toward a "No". Again, these are non-negotiated prices where you just go to someone's website and buy it.
Third, you're going to use developer edition in non-prods because it's much cheaper, but it has all the enterprise features in it. Some you need to turn on, but others just work. Now you're testing against Enterprise, but you're running Standard in Production. I wish Developer had an option to act like Standard.
I have other complaints, especially in regards to HT on a VM, but I think I've said enough for now.
February 25, 2016 at 4:29 pm
Sean Redmond (1/21/2016)
Essentially bigger customers are paying for smaller customers.If they charged a flat fee, it would be great for the bigger customers (because they'd pay less) and bad for Microsoft (because they'd lose many smaller customers).
...us being one of them.
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