SQL Server 2019 licensing reached General Availability on 6th November 2019.
See here for product feature details.
The significant change to licensing (from the 2017 release) is that with each purchase of SQL Server with Software Assurance (SA), you are entitled to:
- Fail-Over servers for disaster recovery New
Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server 2019 instances in a separate OSE or server for disaster recovery in anticipation of a failover event.
- Fail-Over servers for disaster recovery in Azure New
Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server 2019 instances in a separate OSE or server for disaster recovery in Azure in anticipation of a failover event.
- Fail-Over servers for high availability
Allows customers to install and run passive SQL Server 2019 instances in a separate OSE or server for high availability in anticipation of a failover event.
You can also run backups (full and transaction log) and database consistency checks (DBCC CHECKDB) on either or both of these secondary databases.
Microsoft does require these databases to be in non-readable format mode, which is configurable through the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature set.
You do not have to run SQL Server 2019 to take advantage of these benefits. They are valid for any license of any supported version of SQL Server (which currently is any version starting from SQL Server 2012)
For a summary of SQL Server 2019 licensing see the Licensing Datasheet.
Full licensing information may be found in the Licensing Guide.
These includes details of licensing for Big Data Clusters.
Memo: Microsoft allows you to run any nonproduction workloads under Developer Edition, which is free, so long as your workloads aren’t running production. This includes testing, training and user acceptance.
The SAM Club has helped many clients with their SQL Licensing to ensure compliance whilst making significant cost savings. If we might be of assistance please contact us at [email protected] to arrange an exploratory discussion.
You might also find our recent blog around SQL Server licensing case studies interesting.
