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Category: Licensing

Licensing for SQL Server Reporting Services

Published 2020-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry explains licensing scenarios for SQL Server Reporting Services:

When you license SQL Server (of which the SQL Server Reporting Services engine is a part of) you license what is called the OSE or Operating System Environment. This is basically the OS that has SQL Server installed on it. Now, this can be the virtualization host (VMware or Hyper-V) or it can be the Windows Server (SSRS isn’t available on Linux, so we don’t have to deal with that, but if SSRS was available on Linux the rules would be the same as Windows). You can install SQL Server (or SSRS) as many times inside that OSE as you want to, but you can’t install SQL Server (or SSRS) on any other machines.

SSRS licensing isn’t too difficult to understand, relatively speaking.

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Balancing SQL Server Core Licenses Across NUMA Nodes

Published 2020-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Glenn Berry explains how to get yourself out of a pickle in Standard Edition:

Ok, that is bad enough, but it gets worse. Unless you fix it, SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition will use 32 logical cores on NUMA node 0, but only 16 logical cores on NUMA node 1. This can have a significant negative effect on performance. What you want is for SQL Server to use 24 logical cores on each NUMA node.

Glenn then explains how to pull this off.

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Options for Read-Only Licensing with Power BI

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains that, depending on how much you’re willing to pay, there are ways of letting users view your dashboards for free:

In most of my presentations all around the world, I still get this question often: “Is there a Read-Only license for Power BI?”, and often starts with “I have some end-users, who are not building any reports, I don’t want to pay for Developer License for them”. I have written about Licensing in Power BI previously, however, I believe that the article is not explaining it clearly enough and there are still some questions around it. So here I am going to talk about this only: The Read-Only license for Power BI.

Read on for the answers. It’s not all terrible news, but at the very low end, the answer isn’t great.

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Explaining the HA/DR Licensing Changes

Published 2020-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant goes into the fairly recent licensing changes for SQL Server:

Which surprised me a bit because these licensing changes have been in-place for a while now. With this in mind, I thought I would discuss them here to raise awareness about the changes.

To clarify, in SQL Server 2019 there have been some big licensing changes about what you can and can’t do on a passive fail-over instance. Especially if you have Software Assurance.

Which I have to admit I am really excited about. Because it opens up some new possibilities which I will explain below. Of course, there are other significant updates in the licensing guide as well.

Read on for the details.

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High Availability Announcements from Microsoft

Published 2019-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Allan Hirt looks at a couple announcements from Microsoft:

I’m going to discuss what I feel are the biggest game changers. I knew licensing was changing as I had conversations with Microsoft around this months ago. I was not sure what the final result was going to be, but I’m fairly pleased. Is it perfect? No, but it’s much better than it was.

You’ll definitely want to read Allan’s thoughts on Microsoft’s SQL Server licensing changes, as well as a private preview of Azure Shared Disks.

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Licensing for SQL Server Big Data Clusters

Published 2019-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mohammad Darab tackles the licensing question for Big Data Clusters:

One of the biggest questions I had when I first started diving into Big Data Clusters was, “What about licensing….how will that work?” With so many different instances running on the storage pool, data pool and compute pool nodes will licensing cost too much? The answer I got from Microsoft was that it will “be competitive”.

Well, with the general availability of SQL Server as of this week, Microsoft is making it way more financially attractive than I thought. Below is a summation of the SQL Server 2019 Licensing Guide for Big Data Clusters.

Click through for the explanation. It really is pretty simple, all things considered.

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Enhanced HA/DR Benefits for SQL Server

Published 2019-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Banerjee has just made a bunch of DBAs happy:

Starting Nov 1st, every Software Assurance customer of SQL Server will be able to use three enhanced benefits for any SQL Server release that is still supported by Microsoft:

– Failover servers for high availability – Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server instances in a separate operating system environment (OSE) or server for high availability on-premises in anticipation of a failover event. Today, Software Assurance customers have one free passive instance for either high availability or DR
– Failover servers for disaster recovery NEW – Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server instances in a separate OSE or server on-premises for disaster recovery in anticipation of a failover event
– Failover servers for disaster recovery in Azure NEW – Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server instances in a separate OSE or server for disaster recovery in Azure in anticipation of a failover event

You still need to pay if you’re using the servers (as read-only replicas, for example), but this can substantially reduce your SQL Server licensing costs.

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More On Confluent’s Licensing Change

Published 2018-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Woodie has an article covering Confluent’s recent licensing change:

Confluent this month became the latest commercial open source software company to restrict the use of its software in the cloud. The move prevents cloud companies from using parts of the Confluent Platform, such as the KSQL component that uses SQL to process streaming data, as standalone software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
Jay Kreps, the co-creator of Apache Kafka and the CEO of Confluent, explained the significance of switching the Confluent Platform from the Apache 2.0 license to the new Confluent Community License.

Over at Aiven, CTO Heikki Nousiainen shares his thoughts:

The new Confluent Community License is a proprietary software license, specifically excluding “making available any software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar online service that competes with Confluent products or services that provide the Software.”
While the license change does apply to all future versions of the specific software, it doesn’t alter the licensing status of the components in the versions that have been released and utilized by Aiven.

I believe it would be best to read the latter article looking for the significant silences.

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Power Platform Licensing And Pricing

Published 2018-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser explains how you can get started with the Microsoft Power Platform:

This blog post is part of my Power Platform blog series.

Maybe you’ve already heard about the Microsoft Power Platform (which consists three tools Power BI, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow) and now is the time to start testing it?

The first questions that arise are: What do I need? Do I need to pay if I only want to try it out?

Licensing can get tricky, so it’s good to get a clear explanation of pricing and what you can do with the products.

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Reserved Capacity With Azure SQL Database

Published 2018-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Seferlis explains the concept of Azure SQL Database Reserved Capacity:

Last week I posted about the Azure Reserve VM Instance where you could save some money in Azure. Another similar way to save is with Azure SQL Database Reserved Capacity. With this you can save 33% compared to license included pricing by pre-buying SQL Database pre-cores for a 1- or 3-year term.

This can be applied to a single subscription or shared across your enrollments, so you can control how many subscriptions can use the benefit, as well as how the reservation is applied to the specific subscriptions you choose.

The reservation scope to a single subscription allows you to apply it to that SQL Database resource(s) within the selected subscription. A reservation with a shared scope can be shared across subscriptions in the enrollment and there’s some flexibility involved like Managed Instances where you can scale up/down.

Read on for more.  AWS had been offering discounts for reserved capacity for a while, but now we’re seeing Microsoft play the game too.

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