It's a clear win for customers that Microsoft has decided to maintain the status quo with its per-processor software licensing model after dual-core and multicore processor hardware becomes available in coming months. Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the company won't consider dual-core, four-core, eight-core or whatever-core as individual processors, but rather that such technology will be treated, from a licensing perspective, as one processor, no matter how many cores you carve into a chip. That's relevant to SQL Server, as well as to BizTalk Server and other Windows Server System products. Licensing experts and at least one SQL Server customer were gloating at the news, given that it's going to be much cheaper to run SQL Server on souped-up servers than it will be to run Oracle or IBM databases.
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