How is sql licensed

Developer: This edition allows you to build, test, and demonstrate applications in a non-production environment.

A piece of software will be considered in production if individuals, either inside or outside of the organization, use the software for any reason beyond development, including evaluation acceptance testing such as a review of the application before it is put into general use. A SQL server will also be considered in production if it is connected to another database that is in production or runs as a backup or to provide disaster-recovery to a SQL server in production.

As you can probably imagine, mixing production and non-production environments is a recipe for disaster, as this can cause hyper complexity and compliance issues, especially if access controls are not established that prohibits use outside of development and testing. There are a few ways to counteract this problem:. The main challenge with these editions is proving which edition you have. For example, if you are in a software audit, unless provided with evidence that proves otherwise, the software auditors will assume that you only have Enterprise editions, which are the most expensive.

Proving which editions, you have could mean the difference between owing hundreds of thousands of dollars and owing nothing. While Development and Express environments can be great in saving you money, in testing and demonstrating your software before deployment, it is important that these scenarios are licensed properly and that you understand their limitations.

Developer-Specific Licenses: Used primarily for debugging, designing, development, testing and demonstrating purposes. This license is for non-production use only and is often purchased when programmers, professional testers, technical writers, database professionals, or IT administrators are involved. Developer specific licenses are assigned on a per-user basis, in which Users can install and access an unlimited number of SQL Server instances and share those instances only with other users who have been assigned the same type of developer-specific user licenses.

That means, for this licensing model, if anyone wishing to access a development environment requires a developer-specific license, even for tasks as hands-off as administrative purposes. The only exception to this is user acceptance testing. Installations can be set up and taken down at any time and can be placed on desktops, dedicated servers, shared servers, and cloud environments.

Some potentially less expensive alternatives to this license include the following:. Evaluation Licenses: Used to assess the software for potential business use. Again, only used for non-production environments but it is not often used in development and test environments. Usually comes with an expiration date days to evaluate the use of the software when obtained through volume license contracts.

This will cover all the VMs that your software environment will ever see, which comes in handy since VMs are so easily and quickly cloned and installed. You will need a license for every virtual core that you have. Licensing your Virtual Environment all depends on the licensing model you choose, with the per core model proving much more cost-effective for many clients.

Power BI and SQL Server Power BI is one of the most popular services for large businesses, and it can quickly become the most complicated due to its robust environment and its complicated, although critical, relationship with SQL servers. Although you will still need to have a Power BI account for content creation. With the Desktop, however, you can retrieve SQL Server data from tables and run queries that can retrieve a subset of the data from multiple tables.

Licensing for Disaster Recovery and High Availability. Which is why Microsoft, as of November 1st, , has three enhanced benefits to offer to software assurance customers, which can be applied to any SQL Server that is still supported by Microsoft, including failover servers for high availability, disaster recovery, and disaster recovery in Azure. What this means is that you can run passive SQL Server instances on separate operating system environments OSE or servers for high-availability on-prem or in Azure to cover any sort of failover event.

If you have a secondary server that is only used as failover support , then you do not need to license that server separately from the SQL server it is supporting, as long as the server remains truly passive and the primary SQL Server is covered by your Software Assurance. It is most important that you have a means of proving when your servers are passive, since during a software audit, the software auditors will assume that all your servers are active if given the chance to assume so.

This means no more security or feature updates, no more help from Microsoft to keep your environment healthy and protected. Editions sold in the per-core licensing model and Big Data Nodes are sold as 2 core packs.

See the Product Terms for details. Expand all Collapse all. What is new in SQL Server ? Which product editions are offered with SQL Server? Enterprise for mission-critical applications and data warehousing Standard for core database capabilities, reporting, and analytics.

Which other editions are available with SQL Server? Which virtualization or cloud-related licensing benefits are available with SQL Server? License for high VM density by buying Enterprise Edition core licenses and Software Assurance for all the physical cores on the server or server farm and deploying an unlimited number of VMs on the licensed hardware.

License for VM mobility across private and public clouds. VM license mobility is a Software Assurance benefit. Without Software Assurance, licenses can be moved from one server to another only once every 90 days. Benefit from fail-over rights extended to your cloud deployments on Azure or to other public clouds if you use License Mobility through Software Assurance. For more details, see the Azure Hybrid Benefit page. Add self-service BI on a per user basis. Take advantage of cloud-optimized licensing with the ability to license VMs, plus the flexibility to move from server to server, to hosters, or to the cloud—all on the operating system of your choice.

Server [ 2 ]. Free download. Big data node cores [ 4 ]. Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server instances in a separate OSE or server for disaster recovery in anticipation of a failover event. 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.

Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server instances in a separate OSE or server for high availability in anticipation of a failover event.

Applicable under the core licensing model only. Allows license reassignment of SQL Server to third-party shared servers. In addition to the benefits noted above, Server and Cloud Enrollment SCE customers may also qualify for premium benefits, including unlimited problem resolution support. For your specific pricing, contact your Microsoft reseller.

See the product use rights for details. For sales questions, contact a Microsoft representative at in the United States or in Canada.

Whether you're evaluating business needs or ready to buy, a Microsoft certified solution provider will guide you every step of the way. Try SQL Server Apply intelligence across all your data with SQL Server Whether your data is structured or unstructured, query and analyze it using the data platform with industry-leading performance and security.

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