Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Licensing

“License-Free” Managed Instance Requirements

Arun Sirpal reads the fine print:

This is the managed instance link feature; I really like this, if you know about Distributed AGs then you may know they are tricky to setup (well I found this) but Microsoft takes care of this out of the box.

The point of this quick blog is not how to set this up but the benefit of enabling the Managed Instance as “ license free “ via the hybrid failover rights option – do not forget about this.

Read on for the list of requirements.

Leave a Comment

Azure SQL DB Serverless for Hyperscale now GA

Morgan Oslake has an announcement:

Optimizing resource allocation to achieve performance goals while controlling costs can be a challenging balance to strike especially for database workloads with complex usage patterns.  Azure SQL Database serverless provides a solution to help address these challenges, but until now the general availability of serverless has only been available in the General Purpose tier.  However, many workloads that can benefit from serverless may require greater performance and scale along with other capabilities unique to the Hyperscale tier.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of serverless auto-scaling for Hyperscale in Azure SQL Database.  The benefits of serverless and Hyperscale now come together into a single database solution.

Read on to see what this means for you and how it can change the billing strategy around Hyperscale.

Comments closed

Microsoft Fabric Free Trial Capacities

Soheil Bakhshi digs into the fine print:

If you are evaluating Microsoft Fabric and do not currently own a Premium Capacity, chances are you’re using Microsoft Fabric Trial Capacities. All Power BI users within an organisation or specific security groups given the rights can opt into Fabric Trial Capacities. Therefore, you may already have several Trial Fabric Capacities in your tenant. Your Fabric Administrators can specifically control who can opt into the Fabric Trial capacities within the Fabric Admin Portal, on the Help and support settings section, and enabling the Users can try Microsoft Fabric paid features setting as shown in the following image:

Read on for a lot more detail, including several common issues you might find along the way.

Comments closed

Starting a Free Trial of Microsoft Fabric

Andy Leonard kicks off a trial:

Are you interested in learning more about Microsoft Fabric?

One way to begin tinkering with the new platform is to start a free trial. At the time of this post, a free trial is available here:

Read on for instructions on how to try Fabric out. Now that Fabric is in GA, you’ll have to pay once the trial is over, but this does at least give you some time to check it out before then.

Comments closed

Hybrid Failover Rights from SQL Server 2022 to Azure SQL MI

Dani Ljepava explains a new benefit:

Hybrid failover rights is a new benefit that allows you to run a license-free Azure SQL Managed Instance when used as a passive DR replica for your SQL Server 2022 licensed under Software Assurance (SA), or using Pay-as-you-go billing option.

How the Hybrid Failover Rights benefit works

The new Hybrid failover rights licensing benefit is technology agnostic. You can use any technology, such is MI link as the most advanced replication technology using Always On, or perhaps LRS, ADF, transactional replication, backup and restore, or similar to setup replication between SQL Server and Managed Instance. As long as you are using Azure SQL Managed Instance only as a passive replica for your SQL Server 2022, you are eligible to apply the new licensing benefit.

Read on for more details on how you can activate this benefit.

Comments closed

Choosing the Correct Enterprise Edition for SQL on Linux

Amit Khandelwal disambiguates two options:

Recently, in one of the meetings with our CSS team (support) we realized that our customers might not be selecting the right Enterprise edition for their SQL Servers deployed on Linux. To learn more about different SQL Server editions please refer: Editions and supported features of SQL Server 2022 – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn.

Thus, through this blog we would like to provide guidance on how you can identify and update the SQL Server to use the right Enterprise edition which should show up in the error log as : “Enterprise Edition: Core-based Licensing (64-bit)” and not “Enterprise Edition (64-bit)” which is only needed in case you need to follow historical licensing agreements that limits to a maximum 20 cores per SQL Server instance.

Read on to learn how you can change the edition if you did indeed goof on the installation.

Comments closed

Power BI Licensing Calculator

Stephanie Bruno figures out the cost of Power BI using a Power BI report:

Figuring out what licensing model your organization should choose for your Power BI needs has always been a bit of a challenge, and now with Fabric it’s getting even more complicated. Choosing between using all Pro licenses, Premium Per User, or a dedicated capacity, based on factors like the number of developers and the number of content consumers, dataset sizes, etc. can result in some messy spreadsheets. To try and simplify these calculations, we’ve created the Power BI Licensing Calculator. Just enter the inputs and you’ll be provided with a licensing recommendation.

Click through for a link to the calculator.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed