SQL Server 2012 Prices Prepped
SQL Server 2012 must not be that far off. After all, why would Microsoft start to talk turkey about pricing and licensing schemes?
Licensing used to be simple -- one machine, one OS, one app, one price. Buy more copies and pay less per unit. Then upgrades, perks and maintenance were baked in. More recently the number of cores also got taken into account.
The latest wrinkle has to do virtual machines: How do you charge when more and more instances can be rolled out onto a single server?
Despite all these changes, SQL Server 2012, due by next summer, will be much like that of SQL Server 2010.
The biggest change has to do with cores. Customers can opt for the old core license model or pay based on the basic server CAL (plus fees for all the VMs). With the highest end version of the software, the Enterprise Edition, you can have as many VMs on a server as you like.
According to analyst firm Directions on Microsoft, some fees such as the basic CAL have gone down in price, while others, such as fees for multicore servers, have gone up. The end result? It's all a wash, the research firm says.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/07/2011 at 1:18 PM