Every release lately, Microsoft has been turning the screws on Standard Edition users. We get less CPU power, less memory, and few (if any) new features.
According to Microsoft, if you want to use more than $500 worth of memory in your server, you have to step up to Enterprise Edition. Seriously? Standard Edition licensing costs about $2,000 per CPU core, but it can only access 64GB of memory? That's ridiculous.
Take just a quick glance at the SQL Server 2014 edition feature grid and you might be shocked at what Standard Edition doesn't allow:
- Database snapshots (a huge lifesaver when doing deployments)
- Online reindexing, parallel index operations (wouldn't you like to use more than one core?)
- Transparent database encryption (because only enterprises store personally identifiable data or sell stuff online, right?)
- Auditing (guess only enterprises need compliance)
- Tons of BI features (because hey, your small business doesn't have intelligence)
- Any non-deprecated high availability feature (no AlwaysOn Availability Groups – you get database mirroring, but that's marked for death)
Every now and then, I hear managers and DBAs react with shock about how limited Standard is, and how much Enterprise Edition costs – $7,000 per CPU core.
Sometimes they even say, "That's ludicrous! If I was Microsoft, there's no way I would do it that way. And we've got really savvy developers – I bet we could even write a database engine that could do most of what we need."
Okay, big shot. Time to put your money where your mouth is.
The world is full of open source databases that are really good. You're not the only ones frustrated with what Microsoft's done to SQL Server licensing, and there's vibrant developer communities hard at work building and improving database servers.
What's that, you say? You're too busy? You'd rather keep paying support on your current SQL Server, and keep working on incremental performance improvements to your code and indexes?
Yep, that's what I thought.
Microsoft won't change its tack on SQL Server licensing until you start leaving. Therefore, I need you to stop using SQL Server so they'll start making it better. You know, for me.
Update July 30th:: there's a good discussion at HackerNews about this post, and I've been participating. DBAs – if you want to stay current on what startup developers think about databases for their new projects, HackerNews is a good reality check. It's a completely different perspective than the typical enterprise developer echo chamber.
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(Well, except for those people who use Microsoft Access as a database. Those people are all entirely wrong.)
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