New SQL Server 2000 Pricing Announced (OUCH!)
By Chris Miller
on 03 July 2000
| 1 Comment
| Tags: Licensing
Microsoft is adopting a new per-processor licensing scheme for many products, including SQL Server 2000. They're trying to simplify the system, but it doesn't look a lot simpler to me. (MS removed the original link -- this one is the closest to the original I could find -graz)
Go to the link. Check out the Enterprise per-processor charge. 20 big ones. That's right, folks, if you're serving up data with SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition to web clients, you're gonna pay $20,000 per processor for each and every processor in the server. We've got one box that we use to build and process our data warehouse that's using EE just for OLAP. It's a dual processor box (Compaq Proliant 1850). We're gonna end up paying $40,000 for licensing if/when we upgrade. Just for reference, that's a $10,000 piece of hardware (It's pretty well decked out) and we're going to end up paying over $40K for it. And that's if I don't let Sean upgrade it to the quad-processor box.
I mean, I know Microsoft is trying to compete with Oracle, but I was hoping they'd not try to catch them on price.
Keep in mind the common disclaimers on licensing issues:
1. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) and you need to to understand most of these. Read them yourself, come to your own conclusions, or get a lawyer/accountant/troll to read them for you.
2. Those are ERP's (Estimated Retail Prices). If you're paying that much, you need to have a nice long sit-down with your vendor about other licensing options.
