Question : Price of SQL Server

My client needs to buy SQL Server.  My experience is in designing DBs and using it.  I don't know anything about purchasing, licensing or installation.  I want to advise them properly.  If they buy SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition from Amazon.com at a reduced rate, does that price include a certain number of user licenses?  Or are user licenses extra?  Also, if they get a package with 25 user licenses, is that 25 concurrent users, or 25 different user names, regardless of whether they're actively using it?

Answer : Price of SQL Server

DHompster,

I am no final authority on licensing, so I would consult a licensing professional from Microsoft or a Microsoft Partner for more information.

However, here is what I can tell you.

Firstly, if you are advising you client, I would not purchase SQL Server 2000.  I would purchase SQL Server 2008 as you can always run your database as SQL 2000.  

SQL Server 2000 standard comes with 5 user cals.
SQL Server 2008 standard comes with 10 user cals.

SQL doesn't have concurrent licensing as far as I know.  There are device cals, user cals or processor licensing.  I have processor license as it made economical sense for us, but you can work out the math of the per cal cost and see if the per processor ends up making sense for you.  It is essential unlimited clients per each processor as the name indicates.  The trick is that Microsoft only asks you to pay per physical processor, so smaller organizations like ours can have the flexibility of larger organizations in terms of licensing while gaining power of multi-processors by running a quad core or quad core duo (i.e., you can have 8 logical processors for the price of 1 physical with SQL licensing).

Here is a good reference for pricing FAQ:
http://www.microsoft.com/Sqlserver/2005/en/us/pricing-licensing-faq.aspx

Hope that helps.

--isa