After our competition a few weeks ago where we asked why SQL is better than Oracle (concluded here), I wanted to summarize the themes from the responses along with some of the comments that went with them.  So here are the top themes that came out ordered by prevalence in the responses.

1. Business Intelligence capabilities are built in.  Everything you need to actually use your data and make sense of it is also included in SQL Server
   • SQL Server Integration Services (for migrating data into your data warehouse)
   • SQL Server Reporting Services which provides operational and ad-hock user generated reports from the database, which can be managed centrally
   • SQL Server Analysis services for building OLAP cubes to drill into data
2. Manageability:
   • “The admin tools blow Oracle out of the water. You don't need to fork out for a 3rd-party admin tool just to do everyday work.” – Ben Gracewood
   • “Management policies that can be used to stop a number of fat-finger fookups” – Juha Saarinen
3. Price and licensing:
   • “TCO: Superior scalability. No hidden costs in the licensing model. Productivity enhancing development tools.”  - Geoff Coplon
   • “Spatial data out of the box and not a seperate SKU… Built in BI and data mining tools… Built in reporting” – Ryan Crawcour
4. Installation experience
   • “Considerably easier to install (no 20 page install manual required)” – James Newton King
5. Community
   • “SQL Server has an incredibly friendly and "wiling to help" attitude in it's community. Blogs, twitter, newsgroups, forums, user groups. Coupled with the involvement from MVPs, Microsoft employees (including teams like CAT & PSS) who are offering their support for free” – Dave Dustin

We also got a number of comments on skills availability, scalability and High availability options (both quality and variety), pricing (go figure), security options (e.g. encryption out of the box), compression (that even works with SAP), programmability, SQL Server Integration Services (easy to use and very functional), easy back up and restore and a bunch of technical features (such as filtered indexes, sparse columns, code signing via certificates, etc).

Once again – THANK YOU to all of you who participated!

A couple of weeks back we ran the first round of training for the SharePoint Elite Initiative with about 50 people from across the partners who are working to become SharePoint Elite Partners.

It was important for the integrity of the program that the training be the best we could get, so we asked Steve Smith from Combined Knowledge to help us run the training. 

While he was here, we sat down and talked about the training and exams, what he sees as he travels around the world with regards to SharePoint skills and put some context around the SharePoint Elite Partner initiative from a skills perspective.

If you haven’t read the first post on Server and CAL licensing this post follows that.

Processor based licensing

Processor based licensing is very simple – you purchase a license for every processor you will have installed in the server – regardless of processor affinity settings.

So why wouldn’t everyone just go with this licensing option?  Simple - price.  A processor license is significantly more expensive than a server license, and if you are going for multiple processors – be it in a single server or across multiple servers, the price can stack up.

Benefits of processor based licensing

So when does processor licensing make sense? Firstly if you don’t know how many people will be connecting to the server, or you cannot purchase CAL’s for them, you’ll need to use a processor license.  An example of this would be if you are going to host data that will be made available on a public website.

Secondly, if you have a reasonable number of users or devices and only a single CPU license, then processor based licensing might be more cost effective than purchasing CALs and Servers.  Thus processor licensing is good in some cases for database consolidation.

Gotchas

If you are considering processor licensing, there are two key things to consider.  The first I’ve already touched on – the break-even point.  Before going ahead with any SQL licensing, consider how many users you will have connecting to the server and what the licensing costs for them will be.  A rule of thumb break-even point for pricing is around 40 CALs plus one server = one processor license. However, licensing costs varies between corporate and academic organizations for example so costs will vary.  The calculations should look like this:

Server & CAL Price = Number of CALs required + Server price

Processor Price = processor price x processors in server

Of course it’s not entirely that simple.  For example with a processor license you pay the whole price up front.  With Server and CAL licensing you can grow your license count over time, which allows you to build a cost per user model that allows the solution to scale from a business ROI perspective across the organization as users come on board. 

This is quite handy for Business Intelligence for example where initially a BI solution might service only a small proportion of the organizations users now, but grow in scale over time.

The other key gotcha with processor licensing is that if you want to migrate from SQL Server Standard to Enterprise, you pay for the entire solution cost again.  If you consider that with a Server and CAL model you get to swap servers around without having to pay for CAL changes (with caveats – see my previous post) – if you are considering version migration – or if it is a possibility in the future – factor this into your decision making process.

Next we’ll cover off some scenarios and a few guidelines.

Licensing is complex – at least that is what they say. I prefer to think of Microsoft licensing as flexible.  SQL Server is one example of a product licensing scheme that is quite flexible, but yet doesn’t have to be complex (perhaps this is different to other products – I don’t manage the others :))

Server and CAL or Processor based licensing

First up – there are two models for licensing SQL Server. 

• Server and CAL (Client Access License)
• Processor based licensing

There are gives and gets associated with both of these, so understanding them helps you work out what will suit your needs best.

Let me explain these in more detail over a few blog posts starting with Server and CAL here.

Server and CAL

Under the Server and CAL model, both the server and connections to the server are licensed separately.  When purchasing a server license under this model, you don’t have to worry about how many CPU’s the server will have – the license is for the server, not the CPU’s – this is a nice benefit.  In addition the price for the server license is much lower than under a processor based licensing scheme – another nice benefit.  However, for every device OR for every user connecting to the server (whether directly or indirectly), they need to have a Client Access License or CAL.

A CAL is a CAL – or is it?

There are two types of Client Access Licenses available – one for users and one for devices.  A device CAL is great if you are licensing devices used by multiple users (e.g. shift workers) – you only pay for the device the two uses share, not for the users who use the device.  You can also license the users.  This is a good way to go if users have multiple devices for accessing data on the database (e.g. road warriors who may have a laptop and a phone or PDA)

One more thing to know about CAL’s is that a CAL for SQL Workgroup is different to other CALs.  If you purchase SQL Server Workgroup edition under server and CAL, it can be expensive to migrate out of it.  On the other hand, a CAL for SQL Server Standard edition is the same as the CAL for SQL Server Enterprise edition.  This means that a regular CAL (the one that works for both Standard and Enterprise) works well where you have a mix of SQL Server Standard and Enterprise in your environment.

Key advantages of Server and CAL model

The server and CAL model works well in a number of scenarios. For instance, if you are looking to grow the number of servers in the environment (e.g. branch servers, or similar) this is a good model as it reduces the incremental cost of growth.  Another scenario where this is a good option is if you are looking to migrate over time from SQL Server Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition, this model reduces the cost of that migration.

Gotchas of Server and CAL model

If you have lots of users, and not many database servers, then you may be better off considering the Processor based model which works well for a small number of servers against a large number of users.  Also, if you are looking to run a website with SQL Server behind it – you can’t use Server and CAL.

Next post – Processor based licensing

It is well known that TradeMe is the largest website in New Zealand. TradeMe continues to experience amazing growth, for example, in the last year or two TradeMe has gone from accounting for 50% of New Zealands entire internet traffic to 67%!

Because of the traffic TradeMe hosts, the volume of data and transactions at TradeMe are fairly significant by New Zealand standards, so I thought I’d sit down with Matt van Deventer who is in charge of the database infrastructure at TradeMe and see how they use SQL Server and how SQL Server supports their business.  Enjoy.

Over the last few weeks there have been four articles in the news that I wanted to point out – if you look around you’ll find more, but these are ones I wanted to highlight.

SharePoint Elite Initiative

Firstly, of course, there is the SharePoint Elite Initiative which featured in today’s Reseller news (with a link from Computerworld).  Since we met with Amanda, we have also had Gen-i commit to joining Intergen, Datacom, Provoke, Fujitsu and Information Leadership in the SharePoint Elite Initiative.  Their logo will go up on the Elite partner page next week along with a few minor clarifications. This article focuses on introducing the SharePoint Elite initiative to the New Zealand partner community.

PowerCo (with case study)

Next up is a fantastic story in Computerworld about PowerCo, who have recently replaced their Oracle infrastructure with Microsoft SQL Server.  Like many large IT departments, they had both SQL Server and Oracle and decided to rationalise down to just one platform.  Given they were wanting to reduce costs, they chose SQL Server instead of Oracle.

Some people object to Microsoft SQL Server on the basis that it only runs on Windows, but this is one of the reasons PowerCo were able to save money – because by removing Oracle from their infrastructure, they were able to remove HP UX as well and consolidate to a single platform, easing management overheads and saving considerable rack space. 

There is a case study about PowerCo available from the Microsoft Case Studies website which explains more about what they did and the benefits they received – including almost $400,000 in savings per year. Look out for this case study in an up and coming edition of CIO magazine.

Express Couriers

Express couriers were speaking at Tech Ed this week and they emerged in Computerworld (lots of Computerworld articles).  This story highlights the spatial capabilities of SQL Server which were implemented by e-Spatial, a local company specialising in SQL Servers spatial capabilities.  Look out for a podcast with Matti from e-Spatial in a few weeks on more details about what SQL Server delivers out of the box for spatial solutions.

TradeMe

A few weeks back there was also a more generic story in Computerworld about the advantages that the latest databases are delivering to customers.  The article features TradeMe, and the MetService (choosing to continue paying Oracles fees).  TradeMe have a fairly substantial database environment and have some significant transaction figures and statistics by New Zealand standards. 

Watch out Monday for a podcast with Matt van Deventer who manages TradeMe’s Database team where we talk about their infrastructure and the load it manages along with what Matt is thinking about for SQL Server 2008 R2.

As per my previous blog post, we’re launching the SharePoint Elite Initiative today. Last week I sat down with Brent Colbert, Partner Director for Microsoft New Zealand to talk about the initiative and what it means for customers and partners and a little about why we put this initiative in place.

This is the first in a series of podcasts – hopefully one per week, so I look forward to hearing your feedback.

A few months ago I posted about some of opportunities/challenges we have here in New Zealand and around the world with regards to SharePoint capabilities.  That post serves as some background to some work that I’ve been doing for the last couple of months – namely working out how to solve these problems.

With that I’d like to introduce you to the SharePoint Elite Partner Initiative. This is an initiative designed to bolster the capability of SharePoint partners focused on large scale SharePoint deployments and also build a stronger partnership between these partners and Microsoft.

How does the SharePoint Elite Initiative build partner capability?

Successful SharePoint deployments have four core skill sets involved through the life of the project.  Two of these skills are technical (Infrastructure and Development) and the other two are business skills (Information Architecture and End User Engagement). Each has different but complimentary roles.  In a smaller SharePoint deployment, these roles  will be combined, but will still exist.  I’ll be detailing more about these skill sets in a future post.

To build capability, we have worked closely with Combined Knowledge - the SharePoint training experts to build courseware and exams to build and validate skills in these four skill set areas.  Combine Knowledge partner closely with MindSharp in the US and between them are recognised as one of – if not the – best SharePoint training organization in the world.  Combined knowledge have a local partner in New Zealand, KnowledgeCue who helped us coordinate the first round of training.

This training is for experienced SharePoint people – for the technical courses the requirement is Microsoft Certification with 85% pass rate.  In addition you’ll need some significant experience to be able to keep up with the course and pass the exam.

Building a stronger partnership

The other part of the SharePoint Elite initiative is a closer working relationship with Microsoft around Enterprise SharePoint deployments.

The SharePoint Elite Initiative is governed by a council within Microsoft who hold a variety of business functions across Microsoft New Zealand. The council will proactively engage with Elite partners and work through recent projects with them to understand what worked, what didn’t and what needs to be done – both inside the partner and in the broader market to ensure success with SharePoint.

What does this mean to customers?

For customers, working with a SharePoint Elite Partner will mean working with some of the best trained staff in New Zealand, and working with a partner who is committed to optimising their processes and practices in order to consistently deliver quality SharePoint Deployments regardless of the size or complexity of the business being delivered to.

Who are the partners?

The first round of training has been completed and the following partners have invested heavily in training their staff.

My company does SharePoint deployments – Can we join?

The SharePoint Elite Initiative is open to any organization deploying SharePoint to enterprise customers.  More details about the qualifications for partners are available at http://www.microsoft.co.nz/elite. Going forward we anticipate more partners will join, and to that end, Gen-i have already committed to participate in the initiative in the next round of training.

If you have questions about this group, please feel free to contact me here.