July 23, 2017 at 4:28 am
Hello.
Does anybody have a definitive source for whether use of Developer Edition in a commercial business (for non-Production use) is completely free?
I have followed the announcements and discussions for this, and understood that there were no costs associated with it, however without going into any details, I am being told that due to
'other' costs it works out no cheaper than Std Edition Licencing for our Development server(s) which I am very confused by.
TIA for any definitive answers.
Steve O.
July 23, 2017 at 5:59 am
Please ask the people telling you that what those 'other' costs are.
Starting today, SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition is now a free download for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members. We are making this change so that all developers can leverage the capabilities that SQL Server 2014 has to offer for their data solution, and this is another step in making SQL Server more accessible. SQL Server Developer Edition is for development and testing only, and not for production environments or for use with production data.
...
SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition, when released later this year, will also be free.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
July 24, 2017 at 5:18 am
Thanks Gail.
I signed up to Dev Essentials and downloaded DEV some while ago, and the discussion has been ongoing since.
We have a handful of Developers, and the whole Developer Edition debate has been conflated with Visual Studio requirements for them.
In short, the associated cost is that of an MSDN subscription, which I don't believe is required for SQL so I don't get it.
Regards
Steve O.
July 24, 2017 at 5:25 am
No. it's not. See the blog post I referenced.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
July 24, 2017 at 6:25 am
What VS requirements are you talking about that they require for SQL Server? If you mean SSDT, that is also free (if you have developer, Express, Standard or Enterprise). The 2016 version, which is compatible with SQL Server 2012+ also comes with a VS Shell to run in.
Thom~
Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
Larnu.uk
July 24, 2017 at 6:57 am
This isn't really pertinent to your question but it is sort-of a "hidden cost" if you're not careful,
If you're using Developer Edition and deploying to Standard Edition, don't accidentally try build something that's available in Developer Edition but not Standard Edition. Developer Edition is (or was, not sure if it still is) essentially Enterprise Edition, but licensed for use only in development environments. So, you could, in theory, "accidentally" build something in your dev environment that uses an "enterprise" feature that is not available in your Standard Edition target environment. Don't do that -- stick with features you know are available in your eventual production target. Otherwise you may end up having to rip out the functionality (potentially expensive/time consuming), or upgrade your target to a version that has the feature you need, and that would probably get expensive.
July 24, 2017 at 8:22 am
If you're not sure if you're using features that are Enterprise features, this system view can help:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-dynamic-management-views/sys-dm-db-persisted-sku-features-transact-sql
Even before it was completely free, Developer edition was relatively low cost in SQL Server 2012 or earlier, I remember it being like $50 or $60.
July 24, 2017 at 9:17 am
dmbaker - Monday, July 24, 2017 6:57 AMThis isn't really pertinent to your question but it is sort-of a "hidden cost" if you're not careful,If you're using Developer Edition and deploying to Standard Edition, don't accidentally try build something that's available in Developer Edition but not Standard Edition. Developer Edition is (or was, not sure if it still is) essentially Enterprise Edition, but licensed for use only in development environments. So, you could, in theory, "accidentally" build something in your dev environment that uses an "enterprise" feature that is not available in your Standard Edition target environment. Don't do that -- stick with features you know are available in your eventual production target. Otherwise you may end up having to rip out the functionality (potentially expensive/time consuming), or upgrade your target to a version that has the feature you need, and that would probably get expensive.
As far as I know, there isn't something like a server level "edition compatibility mode" setting. However, it would be kind of useful for the development environment to prevent folks from accidentally using Developer Edition to build up functionality that ultimately won't work in production.
What's good about v2016+ is that lower editions are much more feature complete compared to Enterprise edition, so Standard edition users can now use things like TDE, page compression, or Clustered ColumnStore without worry.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
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