Voice of the DBA

Tag: licensing

  • True HA and DR

    For many years, SQL Server administrators have tried to ensure their systems run smoothly by executing DBCC commands against their production databases. As workloads have grown, this has become an issue with resource contention with production users. Backups have had the same issue, and the smart DBAs have offloaded this work to another server. With the more recent versions of SQL Server, we could move backups and DBCC checks to secondary systems.

    The problem with this has been licensing. Microsoft has required a secondary node (often referred to as passive, which Allan Hirt notes is incorrect) to be separately licensed if any activity is performed, which includes DBCC. We could have a secondary system receiving data as a part of Software Assurance licensing, but no activity on this system. A common misunderstanding, and a long and often raised complaint by customers.

    That has changed as of Nov 1, 2019. Microsoft posted a blog that now lets us use those secondary systems for a number of purposes. We can now run DBCC, log and full backups, and monitor resource usage data on a secondary system without requiring licensing. What’s more, we can now have multiple secondary systems that are not separately licensed for both HA and DR purposes.

    Perhaps best of all, this isn’t limited to SQL Server 2019. This is in effect for all supported SQL Server systems. With SQL Server 2012 in Extended Support, I would assume this would apply there. The caveat is that you need Software Assurance (SA) on the licensed systems. You don’t get this for free, but many organizations get SA to allow them to upgrade, and this will be a welcome addition to the value for SA.

    I think this should have been the way that licensing worked forever, as I’d argue DBCC isn’t a workload, but a verification that things are working appropriately. SQL Server should detect this stuff automatically to me, but since it doesn’t, this isn’t any active workload. Neither are backups. Finally, Microsoft agrees.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • New HA Licensing Benefits

    Microsoft announced recently that they were changing the way licensing works for HA and DR situations. I think this is a great change, and the summary is:

    • You can have up to 3 other un-used secondaries for free
    • You can a sync on-prem replica, async on prem replica, and a remote DR replica.
    • You can run DBCC, backups, monitor resource data on the secondaries

    This is a huge change, mostly because most of us expected these would be acceptable uses already, but they weren’t. And many of us had to go ask for more licensing money.

    The Caveat

    There is a caveat here, actually two. You need:

    • Software assurance
    • A supported version of SQL Server

    Those two things mean you need to be under a support contract, but also that this benefit isn’t just SQL Server 2019, but back ported to all supported versions.

    That’s good new.

  • Would You Choose SQL Server?

    I recently wrote a piece on the limitations of the Standard Edition (SE) of SQL Server and got an interesting comment from Brent Ozar. He asked me a question as a businessperson that I found intriguing and it’s one I thought might be worth thinking about it a bit.

    Imagine that you are a manager or director or a firm, or even the founder/owner of a small startup business. You are looking to build some application. Maybe you’ll sell it, maybe it’s a service you sell on the web or with a mobile application. You have people that are good .NET developers, and hopefully a DBA, and you need to choose a database to store data and allow you to run reports. The database is important to the application; no flat files or XML stand-ins. The question Brent asked me, and I’m asking you is:

    Would you use SQL Server?

    Before you answer, remember that you need to buy 4 cores worth of licensing for SQL Server. For Standard Edition, that’s $8,000 at list price. You might find discounts, but since an SE-maxed out, 64GB RAM server can be had for a little over $2,000. If you needed a second server, those prices double. If you want more than 4 cores (8 are common in many servers), the cost goes way up.

    I think SQL Sever is a fantastic product, but it can be expensive. Back when SQLServerCentral started, we considered MySQL or PostgreSQL as alternatives, strictly because of licensing. $10k for software licensing is a lot for a small company, and it can substantially impact a budget. However the cost of working with another platform might be significant as well. A developer can cost more than $10,000 a month, and if you lose much time in building your software (or administering the server) because of the platform, that $10k in licensing costs could evaporate quickly.

    As much as I like SQL Server, and I’d like to use it, I’d consider alternatives such as PostgreSQL for a simple, core database back end. That’s if I weren’t tackling any problems that needed subsystems like SSIS or SSRS. The more features I’d use in SQL Server, the more likely I think the licensing isn’t a huge cost. However when budgets matter, and you have staff that won’t be overly challenged in managing other platforms, I’d consider another platform with the high, per core cost of SQL Server.

    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
    Steve Jones Windows Media Video ( 20.4MB) feed

    MP4 iPod Video ( 24.3MB) feed

    MP3 Audio ( 4.8MB) feed

    Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

    To submit an article, rant or editorial,
    log in to the Contribution Center

  • The Standard Limitation

    Is 64GB of RAM enough for a SQL Server instance? It was in the past for most servers that I’ve developed software on or administered. These days I know some people have 2TB of RAM in their big database servers, which makes 64GB seem paltry. After all, I’ve had 32GB in a laptop before. However I know most of the SQL Server databases out there, in absolute numbers, are fairly small. In the low GB in size. I’d think 64GB isn’t too much for these.

    The reason that number comes up is that it’s the limitation for SQL Server’s Standard Edition (SE), and apparently, it’s my fault the number is set so low. Not just my fault, but all of you out there that keep buying SQL Server licenses. I’m not sure I agree with Brent’s verbiage, but I do agree with his conclusion. As long as SQL Server sells, and it’s selling well, why wouldn’t Microsoft push people to buy Enterprise Edition and pay more to use larger servers?

    Personally I think we should be charged by the scale of the system we use, rather than this weird, limited feature/scale list that MS has. They could easily say that SQL Server is $2000/core and $500/4GB. They could play with the numbers and come up with something that might be cheaper for some, more expensive for some, but it would allow us to easily buy more capacity and pay more as we needed to add hardware.  That’s how the cloud works, and even how many of our virtualized systems work. Want to move from 4 cores and 16GB of RAM to 16 cores and 64GB of RAM? Flip some switches. Depending on the version of Windows, you might not even need to reboot.

    I know some of you think SQL Server should be $5000 and we put it on any size hardware we like, but that’s certainly not going to happen in today’s world. We tend to value computing resources by scale, and I think that’s a reasonable way to examine software.

    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
    Steve Jones Windows Media Video ( 16.9MB) feed

    MP4 iPod Video ( 20.4MB) feed

    MP3 Audio ( 4.1MB) feed

    Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

    To submit an article, rant or editorial,
    log in to the Contribution Center