[brightball]

Internal company workloads. Never use SQL Server for something web facing unless you are ready to have your scaling strategy dictated by licensing costs.

Read replicas, master master, failovers, streaming updated to outside data stores like elastic search before the feature sets are even compared have huge associated costs in workarounds.

[UK-AL]

I think core based licensing is reasonable for scaling.

[brightball]

Depends what you're doing and what your needs are. If we have one big database sitting in a data center and it would be beneficial to setup a read replica for other workloads, suddenly that's a $150,000 suggestion instead of a "We have this server over here".

Want a couple? $300,000.

Big client that you'd like to isolate on their own hardware? $$$$

[UK-AL]

What sort of machine are you running to get 150000 USD?

It's approximately 3-4 k per core using standard.

[brightball]

Enterprise on 16 core machine. $14k / core so it's actually closer to $220,000.