Definition of Commercial Data?

  • I have a scenario where a vendor is setting up a test environment and they plan on pulling the data from production for testing.  This environment is not and will not ever be used for production purposes but does the actual data source dictate the environment and thus negate the terms of a developer environement?  The licensing guide states - "SQL Server Developer Edition may not be used in a production environment or with commercial data."  So I guess my question is, what is the actual meaning of commercial data?  Is it prohibiting the use of data that will eventually go to production, data that came from production or either?   I can't help but think that copying produciton data for testing purposes would be quite a common use case.

    Interested to hear thoughts on this...

    SQL Server 2017 Licensing Guide:

    SQL Server Developer Edition

    SQL Server 2017 Developer Edition is a fully featured version of SQL Server software—including all the features

    and capabilities of Enterprise Edition—licensed for development, test and demonstration purposes only. SQL

    Server Developer Edition may not be used in a production environment or with commercial data. Any test data

    that was used for design, development or test purposes must be removed prior to deploying the software for

    production use.

    Customers may install and run the SQL Server Developer Edition software on any number of devices. This is

    significant because it allows customers to run the software on multiple devices (for testing purposes, for

    example) without having to license each non-production server system.

    Note: A production environment is defined as an environment that is accessed by end-users of an application

    (such as an internet website) and that is used for more than gathering feedback or acceptance testing of that

    application. Other scenarios that constitute production environments include:

    • Environments that connect to a production database

    • Environments that support disaster-recovery or backup for a production environment

    • Environments that are used for production at least some of the time, such as a server that is rotated into

    production during peak periods of activity

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by  Y.B.. Reason: Edited Formatting


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  • Hadn't seen that. I think the idea is that if you are using data as part of business to make money and storing in this SQL Server instance, you need to be licensed. So taking production data for development testing, should be fine. Taking it to produce a report for the boss would not be.

    That's my guess, but I am sure MS had some issue and wrote this in for some reason. You can contact them, but I'm guessing they mean production data and added verbiage for some specific case with a company or country.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:

    Hadn't seen that. I think the idea is that if you are using data as part of business to make money and storing in this SQL Server instance, you need to be licensed. So taking production data for development testing, should be fine. Taking it to produce a report for the boss would not be.

    That's my guess, but I am sure MS had some issue and wrote this in for some reason. You can contact them, but I'm guessing they mean production data and added verbiage for some specific case with a company or country.

    That's how understood it as well.  No part of this environment will be accessible to the end users and none of the data will be used for anything other than testing.  So my feeling was that we should be fine.  I'm just not a fan of intentionally broad statements when it comes to something like this.

     


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