Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Licensing

Microsoft Fabric Free Trial Capacities

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2023-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2023-10-11 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2023-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2023-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2023-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

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

Java Licensing Changes Upcoming

Published 2023-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

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.

Comments closed

Power BI Licensing Guide

Published 2023-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

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.

Comments closed

Airflow and Akka

Published 2022-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

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.

Comments closed