[thelist] MS SQL Server

[Judah McAuley]

Hershel Robinson wrote:

> [ I was again rejected as suspicious for the subject "Which MS SQL Server?"
> Maybe it's the question mark that makes it suspicious? ]
> 
> I mentioned on thelist recently a project of mine--I am upgrading an
> existing Perl-based site from MS Access on a shared server to MS SQL Server
> on a dedicated Windows Server 2003 machine. The question now is, which
> license do I need for MS SQL Server? There appear to be a range of different
> options.

Here is the Microsoft FAQ that covers this: 
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/faq.asp

The short answer is that if you want to be completely legal and this is 
going to be for a publicly avilable website, then you need to get a Per 
Processor license.  Microsoft has two other models available, but they 
both depend on being able to count and license each incoming connection. 
Obviously, that doesn't work so well on a publicly available web server. 
I tried making the argument to them once upon a time that there was only 
one client accessing the DB (my application) but they didn't go for that :)

The only tricky point (besides the overall cost involved) is you can 
actually license SQL Server for a different number of processors than 
your machine has. So if you have a dual processor machine, but you don't 
have the money for a 2 processor license and don't think the db needs 
that much crunching power, you can license it for a single processor and 
then bind its threads to just one processor.  If Microsoft ever comes 
knocking, though, you better be able to show that its only running on 
one processor.

Hope that helps,
Judah