SQL Server Gets More Editions, Higher Prices, Memory Caps

With the general availability of SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft introduced a variety of packaging, licensing, and pricing changes. These include the new high-end edition SQL Server Datacenter; new business intelligence (BI), management, and other capabilities added to higher-end editions; price increases for SQL Server Standard and Enterprise processor licenses; a technical cap on the amount of RAM used by Standard and the number of processors used by Enterprise; and more restrictive virtualization-related usage rights for Enterprise. One major ramification: as customers upscale loads in the future, they’ll likely have to move to more costly editions.

Product Retains Mix of Licensing Models

SQL Server is Microsoft’s platform for relational database management as well as reporting, analytics, and other data management tasks. It includes 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. SQL Server is also a BI platform capable of extracting raw data from operational applications and databases and summarizing and analyzing the data to facilitate decisions based on measures culled from day-to-day business activities.