So what does the new licensing change mean for you? Should you be worried? Well if you’re not sure how your licenses are currently distributed or what you have out in your enterprise deployed right now, I HIGHLY suggest you download and use the MAP Toolkit. With the separation of church and state Engine and BI you can now have a little more flexibility in your choices, especially regarding licensing. In my eyes this is a pretty smart move, although I’m sure some will disagree. The last few releases of SQL Server have been BI-feature heavy and when you’re architecting your setup, you should be setting up dedicated boxes (if possible) for the BI stack anyways.
As SQL Server adoption in the enterprise keeps going up, it kind of makes sense that they’d make a dedicated edition for the BI stack. I think most of us have been expecting this for quite some time as it only makes sense as newer processors are coming with more and more cores.Īs for the new edition of SQL Server, I think it’s an interesting move to say the least. Ladies and gentlemen, start your grumbling! Okay, seriously, the new licensing scheme shouldn’t be that big of a shock to anyone. In SQL 2012 it looks like Microsoft is finally moving to the core-based licensing model. In addition to a new edition (funnily I don’t see Datacenter in that lineup) we also have a new licensing scheme for SQL Server. Microsoft announced a new edition to the SQL Server lineup for 2012 – Business Intelligence edition. Well this was quite the little surprise this morning.