Microsoft allows BYOL for Amazon RDS. Repeat, Microsoft allows BYOL for Amazon RDS

Microsoft now lets customers apply existing SQL Server licenses toward SQL Server usage on AWS's managed relational database service (RDS). The move promises to give customers who decided to go with AWS an easier path to consuming their SQL Server systems as a service, rather than in virtual machines. In a blog post, Amazon explained that customers paying with Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing program could only previously bring their SQL Server licenses to AWS on self-managed Amazon EC2 through the Redmond vendor's License Mobility program. If you wanted a fully managed database like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and you already had SQL Server licenses, you had to pay for licensing a second time through the License Included model," RDS database engineer Srikanth Katakam said. Amazon's Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) for RDS for SQL Server lets customers use existing SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition licenses to cover both installation media and licensing on the managed service, with no additional fees. The process includes three steps, Amazon told The Register: customers submit a License Mobility Verification Form to Microsoft to confirm eligibility; they upload their SQL Server Release to Manufacturing media to Amazon S3; and in the Amazon RDS Console, users should select their SQL Server major version, point to the media file in S3, choose their minor version, and create the database. Customers can track their Microsoft SQL Server license usage with AWS License Manager. Microsoft has declined to comment on why it got involved in the deal. For Amazon, the self-interest is clear: it wants to get the data nearer to its AI tech. Once that operational data is in the cloud, it sits alongside AWS AI and analytics services - so teams can build agentic AI applications that reason directly over their business data without complex data pipelines or infrastructure constraints," AWS said in a statement. Microsoft has its own equivalent technology in Fabric, its data lake and analytics environment, which also offers a control console to manage databases. In the absence of any firm statement from Redmond, it seems reasonable to assume that SQL Server is no longer the strategic priority it once was for the Microsoft. It is inviting users to migrate to its database services, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric. Like AWS, users can also choose from a bunch of database services, including those running MySQL and PostgreSQL, which Microsoft has been increasingly vocal about SQL Server remains third in the DB-Engines ranking, although its popularity has been on the slide for more than five years, and it looks like it will be overtaken by PostgreSQL in the near future. However that may not be of great concern to Redmond's accountants. As a database vendor, Microsoft is doing fine. As Adam Ronthal, vice president analyst at Gartner, pointed out: "Of the leading vendors in 2011 (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP), only Microsoft has grown their market share in the last 15 years." (R)