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Comment by ahachete | Hacker News Reader

> MS SQL server is relatively cheap

At $14K/core [0] for the Enterprise edition, it doesn't fit exactly on my definition of cheap. Sure, it's 1/4th of Oracle's price, but still translates to 6-7 figures for even small deployments, which again is not cheap to me.

But I guess the main attractiveness for current SQL Server uses might be more on the licensing terms/compliance problems than the cost. Just trying to understand how to license SQL Server and how cores are counted already requires you to read a 42-page guide [1]. The risks associated from incorrectly purchasing licenses for your SQL Server cluster(s) may be a compelling reason to jump into open source with minimal migration costs (at least compared to migrating directly to Postgres or any other open source database).

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2019-p... [1]: https://download.microsoft.com/download/e/2/9/e29a9331-965d-...

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> At $14K/core [0] for the Enterprise edition

Licenses are sold in 2-core packs, so it's $7,000 per core. (The link you included is the 2-core pack pricing.)

> still translates to 6-7 figures for even small deployments

The majority of deployments are 8 cores or less [0], so even if they were Enterprise - which they're not - they're 5 figures. Not saying it's cheap, but it's an order of magnitude less expensive than what you're suggesting.

[0]: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2020/03/sql-constantcare-p...

However, (or unless things have changed recently) you have to license at least 4 cores. The 2-core pack only exists so you can use it in conjunction with 4-core packs to license (e.g.) 6 cores.

I assumed it is $14k/core as for the standard edition it is quoted "Standard - per core". It is a weird for me that in the same table the number above is not per core. Yet you know much better than I do, so I will take your number: $7K/core.

Thank you for sharing so interesting data on the usage. This is very surprising to me, though. At least coming from my background (company providing Postgres Professional Services) we see much bigger deployments usually.

In any case, I expect servers to have replicas for high availability. So even an 8-core server would count for a total of 16 or 24 cores for a 2-3 node cluster, isn't it? And then this multiplied by the number of clusters that you have.

Some of our customers run 1,000+ cores on a single cluster. Or some others which run dozens of clusters, where each cluster is 3 nodes, with nodes in the range of 16 or 32 cores. That all adds to thousand-plus cores and arriving to the 6-7 figures (list price) that I was referring to. It may be surprising to me that in the SQL Server world deployments are significantly smaller. But very useful information!

What I believe is that for sure there's a very interesting use case here. AFAIK Amazon always makes decision based on customer requests and data they have. They have both Postgres and SQL Server on RDS. And if they created Babelfish and published it as a managed service, it's probably because there are a significant number of customer requests. Whether that is licensing savings, license/compliance uncertainty or anything else, I don't know for sure.

> In any case, I expect servers to have replicas for high availability. So even an 8-core server would count for a total of 16 or 24 cores for a 2-3 node cluster, isn't it? And then this multiplied by the number of clusters that you have.

As long as you're protected by Software Assurance, you get one free replica for high availability, another free one for disaster recovery, and yet another in Azure.

I can get on the phone with a sales rep and get a custom quote in a few hours, without having to read a thing. And it'll probably be at least 30-50% (or more) discounted from whatever is listed. Microsoft has operated this way for decades. It's cost has also never once come up in a budget review meeting.

That's largely because alternatives like Postgres exist. If they didn't then I'm pretty sure the the conversation would be more along the lines of "take it or leave it."

People shouldn't underestimate the commoditization of databases that has occurred since MySQL and Postgres became acceptable alternatives.

Has nothing at all to do with Postgres, or underestimating anything. Microsoft has a very large, robust partner network that's able get great pricing and the cost of MSSQL really hasn't changed much over the years outside multi-core updates.

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