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Category: Licensing

Licensing for Microsoft Fabric

Reza Rad explains how licensing of Microsoft Fabric will work:

To understand the licensing for Microsoft Fabric, You first need to understand the Capacity structure. In Fabric, there are three important sections that the content can be organized into those; Tenant, Capacity, and Workspace.

Tenant is the most fundamental part of the structure of Fabric. Each domain can have one or multiple tenants.

The capacity is the substructure under the tenant. You can have one or multiple capacities in each tenant. Each capacity is a pool of resources that can be used for Microsoft Fabric services. There are different SKUs for different levels of resources. I’ll explain the pricing and SKUs shortly after.

Inside capacities, you will have workspaces. Workspaces are sharing units that will be used for developers and users. For example, you will create Lakehouse, Data Pipeline, and Dataflow inside a workspace, and you can share them with the rest of the developer team. A workspace is assigned to a capacity. However, you can have more than one capacity associated with one workspace. The screenshot below shows how Tenant, Capaicy, and Workspace work together.

Read on to understand at what level billing occurs, what the options are, and what it means. My gut is saying that F8 is probably the lowest acceptable tier for a real company’s production environment and F2 is more for dev environments or people trying things out. But we’ll know more, I think, in the next few months as people try things out.

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Calculating Reservation-Based Savings in Azure

Saira Shaik reserves some instances:

I have created this dashboard to display the savings made due to the purchase of Reservations or Savings Plans or by signing the agreement with Microsoft to get Azure Commitment Discounts (ACD).
This dashboard is helpful for Customers who:

  • Purchased Reservations or
  • Purchased Savings Plan or
  • Signed Monthly Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) and got a special discounted price.


Customers can view their savings by uploading the Amortized files into this Power BI file.

Click through to se what the dashboard includes and how it all works. Then, check out Saira’s GitHub repo for the template.

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Java Licensing Changes Upcoming

Lindsay Clark covers an upcoming licensing change:

Industry experts have pointed out that businesses with limited Java use would have to license the software per employee under the new model, a dramatic shift from the one Oracle previously afforded them.

This week, Big Red – which acquired Java with its buyout of Sun Microsystems in 2009 – said the new Java SE Universal Subscription is “a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments.”

Seems like as good a reason as any to kick the Java habit.

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Power BI Licensing Guide

Reza Rad busts out the calculator:

Licensing in Power BI comes with many options. Understanding which features are included in which licensing plan is always a question for users. In this article and video, you will learn about all the different licensing plans in Power BI, the scenarios for which to use the licensing, and scenarios for which you may need to change your licensing. This article and video are intended to help you to decide the most cost-effective licensing plan for your requirement.

Reza goes into great detail in the post and then answers a lot of questions in the comments as well.

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Airflow and Akka

Chesnay Schepler responds to an announcement:

On September 7th Lightbend announced a license change for the Akka project, the TL;DR being that you will need a commercial license to use future versions of Akka (2.7+) in production if you exceed a certain revenue threshold.

Within a few hours of the announcement several people reached out to the Flink project, worrying about the impact this has on Flink, as we use Akka internally.

The purpose of this blogpost is to clarify our position on the matter.

Read on for what this means for Apache Flink.

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Checking Power BI Licensing Costs

Gilbert Quevauvilliers doesn’t want to waste money:

I recently was assisting a customer with their Power BI licensing and what I found is that in some instances they were having licenses for Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User.

By going through their licenses and assigning the correct license I was able to save the customer approximately 20% on their Power BI licensing costs per month. And over a year this adds up to quite a bit!

This does look to be more confusing than it really ought to be. I’m not sure of any reason why you would want to have Pro + Premium at the same time, so that state should be unrepresentable.

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Signs It’s Time to Move to Enterprise Edition

Everywhere are signs, says Erik Darling:

SQL Server Standard Edition hobbles batch mode pretty badly. DOP is limited to two, and there’s no SIMD support. It’s totally possible to have batch mode queries running slower than row mode queries, because the row mode queries can use much higher DOPs and spread the row workload out.

I’d almost rather use indexed views in Standard Edition for large aggregations, because there are no Edition-locked enhancements. You’ll probably wanna use the NOEXPAND hint either way.

Click through for several factors which may cause you to want Enterprise Edition over Standard Edition. Similarly, if none of those apply to you, Standard Edition could work well for you.

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Visio Licensing Changes and Power BI

Chris Webb ties a new Visio announcement to Power BI:

There was an interesting announcement today regarding Visio:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/06/09/bringing-visio-to-microsoft-365-diagramming-for-everyone/

In summary there will soon be a lightweight, web-based version of Visio available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 Business, Office 365 E1/E3/E5, F3, A1, A3 or A5 subscription. Previously Visio was not part of the main M365 plans and was only available as a separate purchase.

So what? As a Power BI user, why should I care? 

Read on for Chris’s answer. If the web-based version of Visio is good, I’m reasonably excited by this prospect.

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Just Take My Money: Paying for Power BI Premium per User

Wolfgang Strasser shows how hard it can be to let someone take your money in return for goods or services:

Initially I told my customers, purchase the PPU license in the Microsoft 365 portal and thought that it should be an easy deal.. but hey – it’s licensing, Microsoft licensing involved…

The place where to buy the PPU add-on is not that obvious as it looks like.

Read on to learn how to upgrade to Premium per User if you already have a Professional license.

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Grafana Changing License

Alex Woodie has some bad news for us:

Grafana is switching licensing of its core products from Apache License 2.0 to the more restrictive Affero General Public License (GPL) v3. The company made the change in an attempt to balance the value of open source with Grafana’s monetization strategy, CEO Raj Dutt announced yesterday.

Grafana has been considering a license change for some time, Dutt wrote in a blog post on April 20. This week, the company finally felt the time was right to move.

“Oof” was my first response. I know that a pretty large percentage of companies won’t touch AGPL. I don’t know if we’ll see these companies adopt the commercial version of Grafana, see the companies switch over to something else, or see developers fork Grafana and come up with some other product. AGPL is not quite as scary for companies when a product is at the end of the chain, as visualization and dashboarding products tend to be, but for many companies, that doesn’t matter.

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