I’d like your opinion here.
Follow my logic here for a moment as I walk through a couple
rhetorical questions. Have you ever had a friend developed an
application entirely on SQL Server Developer Edition? (Not that YOU
would ever do such a thing, but maybe you know someone who has. Right?)
And has your friend’s IT department actually deployed said application
only to discover that they’re only licensed for Standard Edition in
their production environment? And then was your friend’s IT management
team is horrified to learn that they’ve either got to go through the
very expensive process of extracting all of the Enterprise and/or
Datacenter Edition features for the production application in order to
remain in compliance, upgrade to the more expensive SKU licenses, or
risk a potential future audit?
I’m not saying that this has happened to any of us. We’re too smart
for that, after all. But have you ever known anyone who’s had this
experience?
Having worked with a lot of customers another commercial RDBMS
platforms (which I’ll euphemistically call “SEER” from Redforest City
and “IB4” from Upstate City), I can tell you that auditing is a fun and
exciting way for those platform vendors to make a LOT of money. This is
especially true because a production application, once successfully
deployed, tends to be too valuable to disable or otherwise compromise
because high-end features slipped in to the development cycle even
though the production environment only a “standard edition” SKU in
place. Ouch! Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.
Now, keep in mind that this is a strategy used by SEER and not by
Microsoft. But Microsoft could implement the same sort of licensing
audits if they wanted to. (Please leave a comment here if you have ever
been audited. I’d love to hear your experiences, at least as much as
NDA’s allow).
So if you use SQL Server Developer Edition (DE), of any version,
would you like to see a feature that enables you to run DE not in its
default “full featured mode” but at another SKU level, such as good ol’
Standard Edition? I know I would.
If you’re on the same page as I am, there are a number of suggestions
logged on Connect about this very feature! Make your voice heard!
Check out:
https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/496380/enable-sql-developer-edition-to-target-specific-sql-version
Of course, the more skeptical reader might say “Hey, that’s their
tough luck. Developers should know the difference in the SKU licensing
options and feature sets of whatever SKU they’re developing on compared
to what they’ll deploy on.” And I wouldn’t fault you for saying so.
But I would go on to point out that much of Microsoft’s success in
enterprise IT settings can be traced back to their very strong
relationship with developers. And anything that Microsoft can do to
empower developers to save time, money, and resources during the
development phase of an IT project in turn energizes that relationship
between developer and Microsoft.
It also makes the life of the DBA that much easier, because they
don’t need to imply that those cowboys on the development team went off
half-cocked again. So what’s your opinion? Should SQL Server Developer
Edition include a feature that sets the SKU-level of the database
engine?