Recently Microsoft rolled out a description of its new SQL Server 2012 licensing model.

When Microsoft’s forthcoming relational database management system (formerly code-named “Denali”) was commercially launched, promised to deliver self-service business intelligence features and other new capabilities as well. Nevertheless, organizations still do need to check out intricate licensing considerations and costs. To make it easier, Microsoft made an effort by publishing its “SQL Server 2012 Licensing Datasheet” document this week, and is also available for downloading.

The new SQL Server 2012 licensing model is grounded on an organization’s computing power, number of users and use of virtualization. The highlight seem  0s to be that licensing costs apparently won’t substantially change that much compared with SQL Server 2008 R2 licensing, except for Client Access Licensing (CAL) costs, which will be higher.

Microsoft believes to release SQL Server 2012 in the first quarter of 2012. Rob Horwitz, research chair at the Directions on Microsoft independent consultancy, considers the product may appear sometime in the second quarter of the next year.

Edition Changes

SQL Server 2012 will be accessible in three editions: Enterprise, Business Intelligence and Standard. The Enterprise edition is a wide-ranging product in terms of its features, and Microsoft is standing it for “mission critical applications and large scale data warehousing” uses. The Business Intelligence edition is a new product offering. It enhances BI features while also including all of the features in the Standard edition. Microsoft applauds the Standard edition for “basic database, reporting and analytics capabilities,” according to its white paper.

Microsoft rolled much of the SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter edition licensing rights into the SQL Server 2012 Enterprise edition, so the old Datacenter edition will vanish as a top product-line offering. Microsoft will provide a Web edition of SQL Server 2012, but only to organizations signing a Service Provider License Agreement. Developer, Express and Compact editions will still be available after the SQL Server 2012 product is released, Microsoft specified.

Licensing Costs

The licensing costs retained the same, decreased or increased. Horwitz shared his views in an e-mail, where he laid out the changes in bullet points.

• “The price of the SQL Server CAL does go up, about 25%.
• “The per-server license for Standard Edition remains the same price as before.
• “The per-server license for BI server is the same price as the server license for SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise…though this isn’t an apples to apples comparison given the difference in SKU features.
• “The per-core price for SQL 2012 Standard and Enterprise edition is one quarter the price of per-proc licenses for equivalent editions of SQL 2008 R2. So effectively, if you have more than 4 cores per physical processor in the server, your licensing fee goes up.”

Cost considerations basically killed the Datacenter edition of SQL Server 2008 R2, DeGroot contended. “That cost $54,990 per proc, or twice the per proc price of SQL 2008 R2 Enterprise,” DeGroot said, adding that “reading between the lines, I’d say that SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter sold poorly, and that’s not surprising.” With SQL Server 2012 Enterprise edition “customers will get Datacenter power at half the price that Datacenter was,” he explains.

Download SQL Server 2012 Licensing Datasheet.