Bill Gates is giving us a break with SQL Server licensing – or is he?

The latest development of multi-core processors has opened the door to affordable performance that was only achievable before from multi-CPU machines. I gave an example recently with the 8-way dual-core HP ProLiant servers used by bostonmarathon.com. Intel is now busy rolling out its Core 2 Extreme processors with quad-cores. What's this got to do with SQL Server? Better performance? Yes. But Microsoft is also giving us a price break too.

The difference is that the multiple cores give the performance of multiple CPUs but from a single CPU socket. Many high-powered servers combine multi-core processors with multiple sockets giving maximum power and support for multi-tasking and multi-threaded applications. SQL Server will use each of these cores as it does a separate CPU to improve performance. But Microsoft will only charge us for each socket in its "per processor" multi-core SQL Server licensing policy. With a new quad-core processor, we only have to pay for one processor license while getting the performance of 4. That's awesome! Especially given that Oracle and IBM apparently charge by the core.

Not only that, Microsoft's 64-bit platform SQL Server pricing is the same as the 32-bit platform. The 64-bit machines offer the support of huge amounts of physical memory - up to 2TB with Windows Server 2008! And you know how database servers love physical memory. Performance improvement on the 64-bit platform is huge! We used to talk about thousands of transactions per minute, now we are talking about millions of transactions per minute. Just take a look at the latest independent TPC-E benchmarks for SQL Server 2008. And Microsoft has announced a price freeze for SQL Server 2008. Am I dreaming?

Well, looking at the NEC Express5800 64-bit Server used in the top benchmark, we can see that no less than 32 dual-core Itanium processors are in use. Let me see...that's $25,000 per processor for SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, giving a licensing fee of $800,000 for SQL Server alone.
Clearly, we're in the wrong business. Or maybe we're in the right one?
Cheers for now,
Brian

SQL Server Multi-core Licensing Policy: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/multicore.mspx
SQL Server 2008 benchmarks: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/benchmarks.aspx

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