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Comment by polskibus | Hacker News Reader

Does it make any sense from licensing point of view to host database on windows if there is a Linux version available? As far as I understand each user hitting that database directly or indirectly via an app needs a CAL for that Windows Server. Outside of an enterprise (ie. Cloud) it gets veery expensive quickly.

Enterprises embraced Linux long ago so not sure if rethinkdb will have much ROI on this effort.

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The HN filter bubble sometimes forgets this, but there are a lot of developers out there who use Windows (even if they don't always deploy to Windows).

Not having to set up a vagrant box just to give Rethink a try may seriously influence developer adoption in this space.

Also while I might personally be able to get by running my DB on a linux VM some friends I'd like to share my apps to run for themselves aren't OK with linux at all.

The docker rethinkdb images made this a breeze but only helps my development.

Depends if your only options are SQL Server or Oracle (it happens a lot with enterprise software).

In that case, SQL Server is often the less costly option. I would do everything possible to avoid an Oracle product based on their licensing schemes. Architecture by licensing is not a fun exercise at all.

I work in a big company (20k+ employees) and we are MS from top to bottom relying as least as possible on the cloud.

You don't have a cal for each user. Say you have rest api server, which talks to sql server. This doens't require a CAL for each user.

from http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume-licensing/archive/2014/03/...

The front end servers used to host your website would generally be considered as running “web workloads” and CALs or External Connectors will not be required to access these servers. Once the customer adds a widget to their shopping cart, creates an account and enters their credit card and shipping information to complete the sale – they are now authenticated via your back end commerce servers/application (non-web workload). Since users are accessing the backend commerce servers which web workloads are not running – CALs or External Connectors will be required for users to access these back end servers.

You would per core licensing, not Server + CAL licensing for the SQL Server.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/server-cloud/products/sql-se...

I thought this would be obvious, since Server + CAL Licensing would make any public site unfeasible, and there are many large sites running on the windows stack.

But you also need CALs for the Windows Server your database sits on.

External connector lisence.

Also I read some Ms documentation that a windows server that runs the database for web workloads may acutally come under web workload. I can't remember that document however.

I don't remember exact number but external connector license is equal to a cost of hundreds if not thousands of CALs.

If you come across that document, I'd be grateful for a URL.

We've heard from a lot of users who want to run RethinkDB on their Windows computer for development purposes.

Production servers could then run on either Linux or Windows.

I'm not too familiar with Microsoft's licensing terms, so I can't really comment on that aspect.

I wonder what in post caused such a downgrade? I'm honestly thinking about ROI for Rethinkdb, I posted link to licensing FAQ from MS in one of my responses for clarification.

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