My pet peeve is core-based licensing for products such as database engines. For that matter, any kind of capacity licensing tied to some variant of Moore’s law inevitably results in the vendor holding their product’s face under water as the tide rises around them.

As a random example, SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to a “very generous” maximum of four sockets, 24 cores, or 128 GB of memory.

That’s just slightly bigger then a laptop these days!

Azure offers a new VM series where the max memory limit of SQL Std is exceeded with just four cores (8 vCPUs): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

There are VMs available now that have crossed the “kilo core” threshold. You can draw pictures in their task manager by creatively putting load on the processors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

The problem here is that Microsoft kept their license limits as constants relative to a reality that moved exponentially. They would have to have applied “inflation”, but they just saw their sales figures go up and up… and nobody will rock that boat!

Inevitably they’ll keep choking their product until it turns purple and dies. It’s a force of nature, there is nothing anybody can do do counter this naked corporate greed that is enabled by accidental mis-pricing. This can never be corrected, except by letting products die and be replaced wholesale in the market.

Time to learn PostgreSQL, I guess…