March 25, 2011 at 2:59 pm
I just got my CCSP for Citrix and one thing I took away from Citrix was ease of licensing. You just add new licenses and the new features appear. Genious. And most of it is around scaling. Some is feature based. How nice would it be to buy Standard, install and configure it, then buy an Enterprise "upgrade", add the license and see the new features! That would also simplify software. One install and features appear as you add the licenses for the higher editions. I know there are problems from a licensing perspective but maybe you could even downgrade by removing the license!!
Anyway, I can dream 🙂
Peter Trast
Microsoft Certified ...(insert many literal strings here)
Microsoft Design Architect with Alexander Open Systems
March 25, 2011 at 10:37 pm
OMG! I LOVE THIS SITE! I am spec'ing out a cloud solution and including sql server 2008 standard edition. I dont want to "rent" sql server @ $300/month for two years. So I decided to buy a license for a virtual machine that has 4 vcpu's. Boy was that document outlining SQL Server pricing an eye opener.
MS marketing is trying to get a handle on virtual machines. I like your idea Steve. The problem is i would end up renting the software from MS anyway. I could pay by the core but they are virtual and vary based on computing needs. The same goes for RAM. PostgreSQL at a price of $3000, $6000, $12000 sounds way better. IJS!!!!!!!
March 28, 2011 at 1:32 am
richj-826679 (3/25/2011)
Steve, I'm livin' your nightmare. See my post on Oracle licensing. To make it more fun, the licensing is all "soft" -- usage is recorded but not prevented. For example, the optional Diagnostic Pack (list: $5K/processor) is required to query data in some system views (any view named "DBA_HIST_%") -- an action that cannot be completely preventable.
It sounds like the problem there is precisely *because* the licensing is "soft". If Oracle were to return a single result set saying "YOU ARE NOT LICENSED TO QUERY THIS VIEW" when you attempted to query those system views without the Diagnostic Pack then things would be a lot friendlier, and I just don't believe that it's beyond their ability to do that. Of course, if they DID do it that way then they wouldn't be able to do random audits to finance another yacht for Larry... 😛
March 28, 2011 at 11:27 am
I'm probably in the minority here, but I think Microsoft is mostly on the right track. From my experience, SQL databases tend to fall either into the mission-critical 24x7 "gotta have the data now" category, or "we can muddle through if it's down for 30 minutes" category. I think licensing should parallel those needs -- and MS is already doing that to some extent. Enterprise supports merry-go-round scans, indexed views, and partitioning for performance. It supports async for long-distance mirroring. It supports online reindexing, online restore, and faster recovery from startup. It supports peer-to-peer replication, updatable DPVs, and SSRS scale-out for high-volume systems. I can understand reasons for all of these features to cost more.
What doesn't make sense to me are features like database snapshots, backup compression, and even the esoteric "lock pages in memory" flag which aren't (or at least, haven't been until recently) available in Standard. But clustering has been. WTH. Just because I'm running an 8x5 system doesn't mean I couldn't benefit from snapshot technology. Or TDE. Or CDC. But I sure wouldn't need online reindexing.
Licensing should be based on how many 9's are needed, not on product features I may or may not ever use.
March 28, 2011 at 11:31 am
Or partitioning. It's not unusual for us to have many 10's of millions if not 100's of millions of rows, but not need the power or performance that an enterprise app like SAP would require.
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