[thelist] MS SQL Server
Judah McAuley
judah at wiredotter.com
Tue Feb 17 10:01:23 CST 2004
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
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