Editorials

Licensing by the Core

I’m wondering about the direction Microsoft is taking with the licensing of the SQL Server engine. Because of the per core licensing model you can carve out how you wish to use the licenses rather nicely. Say you purchase licenses for four cores, because the physical server has four cores, you can use them with different configurations.

Say you have a very intense database application that requires the entire set of cores you could install them as a unit, serving a single instance of SQL Server. However, if you had a number of smaller database applications, and wanted to isolate them from each other for some reason, you could install multiple instances of SQL Server, and assign a separate core to each.

Of course you could also create two or more virtual machines and separate the cores by the host operating system. Then your SQL Server core licenses would be applied appropriately. Depending on the edition you purchase, you can scale up or down based on the utilization of your database resources.

This ability to split or consolidate cores really helps extend the use of your licenses in a way that was not possible before. You purchased a license for the server. If you wanted to carve it up into smaller instances or virtual machines you were required to purchase an entire license for each individual installation. Now you can purchase the appropriate licensing for the individual implementations.

Are you finding the per core pricing model to be more convenient for the way you use SQL Server? Drop a note in our comments with your opinion.

Cheers,

Ben