February 22, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why Are There So Many Editions?
February 23, 2009 at 2:13 am
Probably pretty close, Steve.
My guess'd be that the full toolset is something approximating to "whatever Oracle sell to interact with their database" plus "the most in-demand third party tools written for SQL Server shortcomings that MS have been able to buy the rights to". I'd guess they then categorise those tools according to the size of business likely to use them, then charge what they reckon each target audience will wear. Over simplified, I'll admit, but like you I doubt the decisions on what to bundle in which edition are based on hugely complex formulae.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
February 23, 2009 at 9:24 am
Regardless of the method, they have done well in maintaining a platform that is fairly inexpensive compared to the capabilities and the additional toolsets. Few (if any?) other vendors provide a full package in their given market that does not require many 3rd-party addons for the different tiers of the back office, at such a price point. MS is extremely solid in the TCO game, to the point of leaving competitors with nothing but looking futile and stubbornly holding to anti-MS gimmicks. MySQL has played the anti-MS card well, but has never met the mark, and has never had the toolsets that compare, nor owned it's own ACID compliant DB, and still is 5-10 years behind many other products (depending on what aspect of the product you are considering). Oracle, while powerful, has long been at the top of the price-point game, and still lacks in lower-market-level communication and in some front-end toolsets. Other competitors have not seemed to come close to the footprint of any of these three.
I am an MS fan for one reason: they own the current "sweet spot" in the Price-Quantity with Quality game.
When some other brand can beat that, I will move on. No other product ever has, nor is any close, as none winds the suite together with a common back-suite of development tools like MS. MS is doing exactly what the market is asking for, and the yet the market still complains about the price-point, even in the face of several much higher-costing competitors.
February 23, 2009 at 9:33 am
I think it would be nice if you could customize an installation and price. For example, if Standard edition was the baseline and had exactly what it currently has, but you could get the transparent encryption modules for $X, and the database compression module for $Y, and so on.
The one feature of Enterprise that I don't understand is backup compression. Why is that Enterprise-only? I don't see that one fitting in with the description given in the blog you linked to. It doesn't require a more skilled DBA to understand that backup compression is a good thing, nor should it take any particular expertise to operate it. From what I can see, that should be a Standard edition feature.
Heck, by the justification given, compressed backups probably matter more to smaller businesses that can't afford as much disk space.
Of course, RedGate has a solution for that, so it's easy enough to bypass that issue. But it strikes me as odd that it's necessary to do so.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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February 23, 2009 at 9:51 am
I've asked about the a la carte versions of SQL, but I think MS avoids that to prevent a nightmare of support issues. Which features do you have when you call? I don't think it should be that big a deal to figure out. Automate it, right?
Compression is one that stumps me as well. I think that it's a big selling push to get larger companies, who save more, to move to EE.
February 23, 2009 at 9:58 am
Steve Jones - Editor (2/23/2009)
I've asked about the a la carte versions of SQL, but I think MS avoids that to prevent a nightmare of support issues. Which features do you have when you call? I don't think it should be that big a deal to figure out. Automate it, right?Compression is one that stumps me as well. I think that it's a big selling push to get larger companies, who save more, to move to EE.
Yeah, the support issues for that would likely drive the price up. But by how much? Also would mean the various pieces would have to decouple easily, which may or may not be the case. Should be technically possible, but Microsoft doesn't seem to work that way.
Take Vista for example. You can't buy a "Basic Vista", and then tack on the extras that you want. Would be nice to have some of the features of Ultimate available as for-pay add-ons to Home Premium or Business, for example. But MS doesn't seem to want to work that way.
Office kind of works that way. You can buy a copy of Word, or you can buy a copy of Office that includes Word. Want Access? Buy a copy of Office Pro, or buy a lower-end copy of Office and buy Access separately, or just buy Access all by itself.
Might be clever if they did something similar for Windows, SQL Server, et al, but not sure if they ever will.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
February 23, 2009 at 10:30 am
More editions means more choices. People like choices, right?
😛
February 23, 2009 at 11:34 am
People like "custom".
Let's have 4 editions of SQL
- Compact/Embedded
- Express/Free
- Developer
- Standard
then let us choose which features we want on Standard. We could have a chain of license keys, each unlocking some feature that's worth paying extra for. Want compression but not partitioning, add it on. Add in partitioning later if that's important. TDE, etc.
February 23, 2009 at 11:46 am
Steve Jones - Editor (2/23/2009)
People like "custom".Let's have 4 editions of SQL
- Compact/Embedded
- Express/Free
- Developer
- Standard
then let us choose which features we want on Standard. We could have a chain of license keys, each unlocking some feature that's worth paying extra for. Want compression but not partitioning, add it on. Add in partitioning later if that's important. TDE, etc.
Sounds like a good list. Workgroup Edition doesn't get a lot of mileage from what I can tell.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
February 23, 2009 at 2:22 pm
The free edition gets people interested in the product. Once they see what it can do, they hopefully get hooked and want more.
February 23, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Sailor (2/23/2009)
The free edition gets people interested in the product. Once they see what it can do, they hopefully get hooked and want more.
Would that were true! Can't seem to get much traction with any of the free Express SKUs -- even the ones that feel almost like Standard (i.e. Express with Advanced Services). It's getting better, but it's not always about just the price tag.
FWIW, producing an additional SKU is non-trivial work (just like obsolescing them), and I sincerely doubt we go through the trouble just because somebody thought it was a good idea.
Bonus points for anyone who can name additional "real" proposed SKUs that didn't make the cut... (Maybe bonus points for humorous parodies, too.)
:hehe:
February 23, 2009 at 10:17 pm
I agree, not sure people get hooked on Express and grow. They use Express in places where it fits.
Produce new SKUs? Why not "unlock" features? You have the technology in the XBOX group to unlock things according to some event. Why not use some "product key" to unlock features people want to pay for?
SKUs that didn't make the cut? You mean edition names? Or something else?
February 24, 2009 at 1:30 am
David Reed (2/23/2009)
Sailor (2/23/2009)
The free edition gets people interested in the product. Once they see what it can do, they hopefully get hooked and want more.Bonus points for anyone who can name additional "real" proposed SKUs that didn't make the cut... (Maybe bonus points for humorous parodies, too.)
:hehe:
OK then...
How about Prequel Server, where MS put all the bugs back in so people can see how it all began.
Or SQL Server Olympic Edition, to hit the shelves in 2014 😉
SQL Server Manager's edition has had SSMS amended to remove all the potentially dangerous functions, which have in turn been replaced with lots of dynamic graphs and traffic lights.
And the SQL Server development team have finally caught up with their Excel counterparts and added a flight sim easter egg to SQ Server. They've code-named that one "Hudson".
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
February 24, 2009 at 1:52 am
Oh, and I forgot. What about SQL Server Economy Edition, that doesn't crash often but costs about $7 billion to get started again when it does.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
February 24, 2009 at 7:35 am
SQL Server Fisher Price Edition - Big, Colorful buttons for one click access to safe functions like "Backup", "Restore", "New User". It does most of the work for you and doesn't give you many options.
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