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SQL Server 2014 Free for Visual Studio Dev Essentials Members

It's limited what VSDE member can do with it. Also: SQL Server 2016, when released later this year, will also be free.

Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director of Data Platform Marketing with Microsoft, blogs about a new offering for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members: SQL Server 2014 is now free, but only for testing purposes.

"We are making this change so that all developers can leverage the capabilities that SQL Server 2014 has to offer for their data solution, and this is another step in making SQL Server more accessible," she said, in a blog posted yesterday. She notes that it's effectively free to use as long as it's not deployed into a production environment. "SQL Server Developer Edition is for development and testing only."

SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition retails for $50 per machine for a single license. It's currently available on sites such as Amazon.com and CDW.com.

SQL Server 2016 is currently in development; just today, the SQL Server Team released SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate 2. Some of the feature highlights of the new release include row-level security, Dynamic Data Masking, a Query Store for storing query with performance data, Stretch Database capabilities, and a number of in-memory database enhancements, to name a few. For more, read these ADTmag.com and Redmondmag.com articles.

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