SQL Server Licensing is Simple

Voice of the DBA

Over the years I’ve had no shortage of licensing questions for SQL Server. At times it’s felt a little crazy. Look at the licensing guide. Choose EE or SE and the number of cores. Then check if you’re using VMs. Oh, and consider the cloud, and which cloud you’re running a workload on.

It’s simple right?

It can seem confusing, and at times I’ve wished Microsoft would make it simpler. And perhaps even give us some add-ons, like adding some additional hardware capabilities (cough more RAM *cough) in SE.

Then I run into something like the introduction to Oracle licensing. This is one of the smaller guides on a site devoted to Oracle licensing. There are numerous articles on there, with lots of information, perhaps too much, to help anyone get a handle on this process. There are even companies (one, two) built around helping you manage Oracle licenses.

There’s a core factor table, where you need to figure out how to adjust your “license cost” based on the CPU. That’s after you pick the edition, and likely before you go into the other features you might need. I’m guessing this is why a lot of people might just pay for the Unlimited license and stop worrying. I think this is also why Oracle is still such a huge company and worth billions (or trillions?) of dollars.

I actually asked Claude to help me with Oracle licensing. I got these (partial) results, which talks about the different core licensing, editions, and then other costs. As I ask for more details in any area, this gets very complex and confusing. While some of the rules for SQL Server can be confusing, and certainly the HA and virtualization guidelines sometimes leave something to be desired, overall, I find things simple.

I like simple.

Over the years, many software companies have made licensing more complex and confusing to customers. Often this results in more profit for them without much benefit for the purchaser. Not all vendors do this, but Oracle certainly has created a complexity that spawned a whole business model for a few companies. SQL Server licensing is simpler, and I’ve learned to appreciate that.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.