Licensing

Businesses who need high availability and disaster recovery usually want three servers: A primary SQL Server where all the writes & reads take place A high availability SQL Server sitting right next to the primary, in the same data center, keeping up with its writes, and A disaster recovery SQL Server sitting in another city…

How to Upgrade SQL Server Evaluation Edition to Developer Edition

Last Updated June 14, 2020

Six months ago today, you installed SQL Server Evaluation Edition. You told yourself you’d take care of that sooner or later, and…you forgot. Now, your SQL Server won’t start: Error 17051: SQL Server evaluation edition has expired. Awww, shucks. Good news though! You don’t have to uninstall & reinstall from scratch – there’s an easier…

DBA Training Plan 19: The L-Word, Licensing

Last Updated September 6, 2019

DBA Training Plan, Licensing

You’ve gotten through a lot of this training. You’ve tried fixing the problem with indexes, query tuning, and judicious application of various configuration switches. You’ve been watching webcasts and using free scripts, but… Things just aren’t getting better. Before you start browsing your cloud vendor’s sizing price list or your favorite server vendor’s build-and-price site,…

Pop quiz: what do these things cost?

Last Updated March 9, 2019

Cloud Computing, Hardware, Licensing

It’s been a few years since we’ve stopped in for a sanity check. Quick: without searching the web for prices, put these items in order. Do it on a scratch paper, guessing how much you think each one costs, then arrange ’em. SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition licensing for 4 cores SQL Server 2017 Enterprise…

Confession: I recommended that a 5GB database get split up.

Last Updated April 5, 2017

Licensing, Microsoft Azure, SQL Server

Listen, I can explain. Really. Photo by Toa Heftiba We had a client with a 5GB database, and they wanted it to be highly available. The data powered their web site, and that site needed to be up and running in short order even if they lost the server – or an entire data center –…

Thanks, Google

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Tara Kizer

I usually can count on Google to figure out what I want to search for, even if there’s typos in my search. But sometimes Google just doesn’t get it right. I’m not Brent Ozar. I can’t afford a Rolex! Do you have any searches that Google or Bing didn’t get right and made you laugh? Drop…

Should I Install Multiple Instances of SQL Server?

Last Updated April 9, 2017

Marina Towers in Chicago Instance stacking is the technique of installing multiple instances of SQL Server on the same Windows instance. For example, you might have a VM or server named SQLPROD1, and have: SQLPROD1 – default instance of SQL Server, say SQL 2016 SQLPROD1\SQL2014 – for our older apps SQLPROD1\SharePoint – because it’s supposed…

The Cost of Adding a Reporting Server

Last Updated February 13, 2017

In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton), Licensing, Partitioning, SQL Server

Architecture, Licensing, Log Shipping, SQL Server

“We’d like to offload our reporting queries to a separate SQL Server.” The first costs are fairly obvious. Hardware and storage – even if you’re running it in a virtual machine, you need to account for the costs of say, 4 cores and 32GB RAM. Not only will you need storage for the databases, but…

Initial Thoughts on 2016 SP1

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Erik Darling

A really odd choice I’ve talked a bit about my annoyance with hardware limits for Standard Edition here and here. If you’re a bunch of SQL-savvy developers who understand the Enterprise Edition features that are now available in 2016 SP1, great. You’re a very small minority of shops. I’m talking about places like StackOverflow and…

SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition Now Has Many Enterprise Edition Features.

Last Updated February 13, 2017

In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton), Licensing, SQL Server

Starting with today’s release of SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1, Standard Edition now has a lot more of the features of Enterprise Edition. Here’s the list from Microsoft’s announcement post: Performance features – in-memory OLTP (Hekaton), in-memory columnstore, operational analytics Data warehousing features – partitioning, compression, CDC, database snapshots Some security features – Always Encrypted,…

Searching Strings in SQL Server is Expensive

Last Updated June 25, 2018

Execution Plans, Licensing

In the classic spirit of my How to Think Like the Engine class, let’s go take a look at the StackOverflow.Users table and find all the users named Brent. There’s a DisplayName field, and I’m going to be querying that a lot in this blog post, so I’ll go ahead and create an index on…

The Problem with Windows Server 2016 Licensing

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide (PDF) Windows Server 2016 is now licensed by the core, but that’s not really the big problem. The bigger problem is buried in the licensing guide (PDF): “A minimum of 16 core licenses is required for each server.” “A minimum of 8 core licenses is required for each physical processor.” When…

What kind of hardware can you buy for one core’s worth of Enterprise Edition?

Last Updated April 9, 2017

In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton), Licensing, SQL Server

Dell R730 Microsoft charges $14,256 for a 2-core pack of SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition. So how much hardware can we get for $7,128? I started with one of the more common 2-socket server models, a Dell PowerEdge R730, and then optioned it with: Chassis – up to 8 2.5″ drives (because 2.5″ drives aren’t…

RAM and Sympathy

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Erik Darling

With the release date for 2016 finally announced Everyone can start gearing up to gaze upon its far shores from the 2008R2 instance they can’t or won’t upgrade for various reasons. I’m excited for a lot of the improvements and enhancements coming along, and generally hope I’m wrong about customer adoption. One annoyance with the…

Microsoft SQL Server is Coming to Linux.

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Two things: SQL Server is coming to Linux, and no, this isn’t April 1st, although the meeting minutes kinda read that way. Let’s zoom back for a second: if you want to expand an existing business, you have two good options: Sell a new product to your existing customers Sell your existing product to new customers For years,…

Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts: Much Cheaper SQL Server Licensing

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Licensing, SQL Server

When you build SQL Servers in your data center, and you license the host with Enterprise Edition, you get the ability to run as many virtual SQL Servers as you want on that hardware. In the cloud, though, you haven’t had that luxury. In the past, with Azure VMs and Amazon Web Services’ EC2 VMs,…

Microsoft SQL Server Licensing Simplified into 7 Rules

Last Updated March 1, 2024

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Licensing is really complex, but as long as you know these seven rules, you can go a long way: If you query it, you have to license it. “It” means the Windows environment – all of the processor cores that Windows sees. (Things get a little weirder under virtualization.) Offloading a backup or a DBCC is…

Are You Getting the Benefits of Virtualization?

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Licensing, SQL Server, Virtualization

Here’s some of the reasons companies usually virtualize their SQL Servers: Cost savings on hardware Cost savings on Windows OS licensing Cost savings on SQL Server licensing Protect against the failure of a single hardware element Leverage extended features for Disaster Recovery Automatic load balancing across multiple hosts Easier hardware replacement/migration When we perform a SQL Critical…

How to Ask Microsoft a SQL Server Licensing Question

Last Updated October 23, 2018