More Choices! Wait, Fewer Choices!
More options! More granularity! More features, but let me choose… OK, here you go. Wait… too much.
That’s a bit how I feel about how things are shaking out with cloud licensing for SQL Server (and other services too, but I’m picking on SQL Server for this…) It’s really great to see how many different things are possible and available, but it’s also getting much, much more difficult to make choices on what’s best for my environment. The differences between options can have a significant impact on your systems… Check out this blog post about versions and options in Azure:
Azure SQL Database Service Tiers (Editions)
It’s not small feat now to pick and choose between some of these options. You really have to dig deep into the version, the capabilities and… unfortunately, the recovery options. It’s odd to see the differences in recovery. I was surprised that this has become a feature to select from. I would have expected this to drive storage costs (so pick your recovery window appropriately, because you’re paying for that storage choice), but not a core feature to make your version selection.
So, of course, the normal response is "OK Steve, how would YOU recommend we break things out??"
I have to admit, I don’t know.
I think the options for geo-replication and failover make sense as a differentiator. Certainly performance. I’d toss in other things like encryption and full-text capabilities, but I don’t think I’d drive on database size (perhaps a "mini" version that goes under 5G or something, but after that, you’re just really buying storage).
To me, though, those options in the far right column that talk about recovery aren’t feature levels as much as they are resource usage. Since there are incremental costs already "baked in" to those processes (bandwidth, storage, etc.)… I think it’s covered.
How would YOU break out the various versions? Any suggestions?