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Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest ;) SQL Server is such an expensive beast, ~$15K per core, what are your reasons for prefering it over PG?

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I quite like Postgres and use it preferentially, but your numbers are off. SQL Server Enterprise costs more like $7500/core; that $15K pack, as far as I am aware, comes with two core licenses. SQL Server Standard 2016 costs $931 for a license if you use CALs ($209 a pop), or $3700/core.

Also bear in mind that almost nobody pays list price for any of this.

$7500 per core, but only $15,000 for two cores sounds like a sweet deal though.

There are no more server CPUs with less than 6 cores though.

We could happily manage with just 2 dedicated to SQL server, but you have to license all the cores you have. So 3K worth of low end hardware ends up costing you several multiples of that in licensing.

I imagine a VM is a good solution to that.

Windows also let's you set CPU affinity per process - could that be used as a simple workaround?

I laugh when people have to deal with these problems when others are solving real problems using free tools.

> but you have to license all the cores you have

Is that the case? I'm sure I've seen people running on limited cores for licencing reasons rather than having to licence every core. Not sir if that was enforced by the engine refusing to use more, or via seeing processor affinities.

What features in SQL Server Enterprise do you need? More than 24 cores? More than 128GB of RAM?

I ask because SQL Server Standard is significantly cheaper when you're using CALs instead of unlimited connections. Ten servers fronting a SQL Server Standard install is $3K, which at a large enterprise is often within a director-level's discretionary equipment budget.

User CAL is only cheap if you only deal with small amount of users (internal app). Please note a user is not SQL User account, but represents actual individual person. If you have a webserver (with one db user) but a thousand of visitors, then Microsoft treats it as thousand user CALs . Following MS doc explains this in detail http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/F/8/6F84A9FE-1E5C-4... , look for keyword 'multiplexing'

Huh, TIL. I literally had a Microsoft sales rep tell me otherwise. Anything to get the sale, I guess.

For someone who grew up with decent open source solutions in the software stack, that deal simply sounds insane and it should be the majority's thinking soon enough.

And if those paidwares don't solve your problems exclusively, I doubt people would choose to use it when they can solve their problems with the tools they grew up with.

Having to spend time dealing with the MS licensing mess, rather than building software, seems wasteful and in my experience can be likened to sitting on a cactus for an extended period of time.

I agree. (My own stuff is pretty much all Postgres and the occasional MySQL.) But when you're in an organization where your needs might merit SQL Server, I'd hope you'd have somebody to deal with that for you. ;)

Day job. Never had to pay for it out of my own pocket! I've worked at MS shops for quite some time.

Also while we can do what we like with our newer SaaS offerings, getting some of our on-prem clients to use PG over SQL Server would be an uphill struggle so not considering other options isn't entirely our decision.

That $15K sounds like an Enterprise Edition costing too, IIRC Standard is significantly cheaper. Most don't need Enterprise, especially since 2016Sp1 when a lot of previously Enterprise-only features became available in all editions (including the free Express edition in many cases). Developer edition is currently free (licensed for development use only, of course) and is essentially Enterprise edition with different licensing terms.

It's about $7000 per core for enterprise - and if you do something like license a whole blade and put VMs on top of it, you could fairly easily run 10-20+ SQL VMs on one decent sized blade for < 150k. And anything pre-prod is free. It's a small cost for most larger size companies of this scale. If you have one or two servers, then no, enterprise is probably out of reach.

I use MS-SQL for my day job, and Postgres for personal projects. Pros of MS-SQL are mainly 1) easy integration with the universe of Microsoft dev tools, frameworks, and infrastructure, and 2) great database tooling in itself:

* SSMS - SQL Server Management Studio

* The MS BI stack: SSRS (reporting), SSAS (analysis), SSIS (integration)

The tooling is indeed sweet, and in a big company I could see it paying for itself in saved dev time.

Sounds like a victim of vendor lock in. I assume you will bleed hard to get out of it.

How is this any different from the sunk cost that's a consequence of going with _any_ particular technology stack?

I mean, if you chose Python/Postgres/etc., presumably, you'd have to rewrite/retool everything if you went to a different stack.

If you're talking about open vs closed source: the C# compiler (Roslyn) is completely free and open source, as are a number of .NET components: CoreFX - Core foundational libraries, CoreCLR - runtime.

As well as PowerShell, VS Code, Typescript, ASP.NET Core, MVC, Blazor, F#, Z3 Theorem Prover, etc.

And that's from just the first few pages of their Open Source page: https://opensource.microsoft.com/

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