Introduction

Licensing systems on Microsoft’s platform often entails licensing SQL Server, which delivers database management, reporting, analysis, and other business intelligence functions to the overwhelming majority of Microsoft server applications as well as many custom and third-party commercial applications. SQL Server customers must choose between more product editions and licensing options than for any other Microsoft offering, and must contend with complex rules and special exceptions that can lead them to require more (and sometimes even fewer) licenses than they might otherwise anticipate. The latest version, SQL Server 2008 R2, maintains most aspects of the SQL Server licensing model but raises some tricky transition issues.

Multiple Components, One License

SQL Server is in fact several freestanding components sold under one license. The most prominent is a database engine for storing, managing, and retrieving large volumes of related business or transactional data, including tools for administering databases, data access libraries that enable applications to communicate with the database, and utilities for replicating and synchronizing copies of data across multiple sites. The product also includes components for extracting data from operational systems for analysis (Integration Services), online analytic processing and data mining (Analysis Services), and design and distribution of reports (Reporting Services). Lastly, some editions of SQL Server 2008 R2 include a complex event-processing platform that scans new input to detect important patterns and responds on the fly (StreamInsight) and a system for improving data consistency across multiple independent database systems to improve the accuracy and value of reporting and analysis functions (Master Data Services).