Edition capabilities, licensing models, limits, and licensing decisions.
22 associated posts22 primary posts
Your app is happily humming along on SQL Server Standard Edition. Things are quiet - too quiet. You're wondering what you're missing, and whether you should be on SQL Server Enterprise Edition. Here are 3 warning signs to watch out for.
Developers say, "Any downtime is unacceptable."
As a consultant, I sometimes see SQL Servers with high CPU core counts relative to their workload. For example, the situation that inspired this post was seeing half a dozen SQL Servers with ~50 cores each, hundreds of cores total - yet they consistently had just 1-5% CPU usage. Here's what I said to management:…
At least once a month, a client has The Postgres Conversation™ with me.
It happens at the end of a consulting engagement, after we've talked about the work that the team needs to do in order to meet their performance objectives.
I stopped at a waterfall in Iceland to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWguvLfHaNA
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 or region, keeping up with the writes, but not necessarily in real time - the writes here are usually asynchronous
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 way.
When you're downloading SQL Server, it's important to choose Enterprise Core, not Enterprise. The plain "Enterprise" one is limited to just 20 CPU cores.
But let's say you didn't know that, and you waltzed over to the download page. There are two Enterprises listed, and it's not really clear what the differences are between the two:
The features list by edition is out, and there's a disclaimer at the top:
This content is being updated for SQL Server 2019. The information in the article is not final.
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.
Back in the early 1980s, Dr. David DeWitt - who you might know from past PASS Summit keynotes, formerly of Microsoft (LinkedIn) - was working on measuring database performance. His team wrote a benchmark, ran it against Oracle, and Oracle didn't fare well in the results.
Oracle reacted as one would expect - they were furious, and wanted DeWitt fired. You can read DeWitt's remembrance of it in the article DB Test Pioneer Makes History by Timothy Dyck.
I know, I know, I'm biased because I'm a SQL Server guy. Hear me out, though, and I'll give you both sides.
The Good
It's stable and mature. SQL Server has been out for forever, so it's easy to find blogs, videos, books, and people who can help.
Everything integrates with it. Visual Studio, reporting tools, everything is aware of SQL Server. Everything has drivers for SQL Server.
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."
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?
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…
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. (Backups and corruption checks are not considered querying.) You have to license all of the processor cores that the operating system sees, even if you're not allowing SQL…
Take my three question survey...
Brent Says: SQL Server Developer Edition licensing is crazy cheap, and it has no per-core licensing fees. I like taking the oldest server I have with a huge number of cores, something that doesn't make licensing sense for any other purpose, and throwing Developer Edition on there.
It's a bummer that SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition only allows you 64GB of memory. And it's good news that the limit goes up to 128GB of memory in SQL Server 2014.
But are you getting as much memory as you can out of Standard Edition?
If you don't license all of your SQL Server's CPU cores, you need to pay particular attention to your server hardware.
Say you're using an HP DL580 with four CPU sockets, each of which has a Xeon processor plugged in with 10 cores. That's a total of 40 real cores, or 80 logical processors if you've enabled hyperthreading.
You have a sneaking suspicion that your servers aren’t all paid for, and you need to get a rough idea of how SQL Server licensing works. You’ve never bought a box of SQL Server before, and you have no idea where to get started.
Microsoft Certified Master Brent Ozar will break it down into a few simple, easy-to-understand slides and show you the most popular licensing options. He’ll also explain 3 classic licensing mistakes and help you avoid ‘em in this 20-minute video.
Every single thing you do with a virtual SQL Server starts with one very important concern: how are you going to license it? The 3 Common Ways to License Virtual SQL Servers Developer Edition, by the guest - Developer Edition has all the power of Enterprise Edition, but it's way cheaper - and starting with…
