How to get SQL for Free

17/06/2020

With a SQL Standard licence coming in at around £2850 per core, and Enterprise topping out at £10,925 per core (minimum 4-cores per box), SQL Server is not cheap.

Everyone likes a bargain, and free is as good as it gets.

There are a multitude of ways to get SQL Server and demo data for free. Here are some of your options:

Express Edition

Microsoft offer a completely free version of SQL Server. It has limited features, but will do well for many environments, including learning how to code.

You can install SQL Server Express Edition on a Windows Server or on your PC/laptop and it is ok to use it in production.

Download a copy from here:

Express Edition has limited features and scalability. The Features & Requirements links above include an Edition Comparison table for full details.

To highlight the trend, these are a few key features and limitations in SQL 2019 Express edition:

  • Limited to lesser of 1 socket or 4 cores
  • Limited to 1410 MB RAM
  • Limited to 10 GB per database
  • No HA (AlwaysOn, Mirroring, Log Shipping)
  • No SQL Server Agent or Database Mail
  • No Online Indexing, Online Schema Changes or Online Page and File Restores
  • No Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) or Encrypted Backups

Developer Edition

Another Free Microsoft offering is SQL Server Developer Edition. It is fully featured (same as Enterprise Edition), but is limited by licence to development and test installations only.

You can install Enterprise on a Windows Server or on your PC/laptop

Note: You can install Developer Edition on Windows 10, but not Enterprise Edition.

Download a copy from here:

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft are offering a free SQL server in Azure for up to 12 months.

You don't have to worry about installing SQL, hardware or maintaining Service Packs. Microsoft do it all for you in Azure.

The free tier SQL Server includes:

  • An S0 SQL instance...
  • SQL 2019
  • Up to 250Gb storage
  • 10 DTUs (Database Transaction Units - a package of CPU, RAM & IO allocation)
  • 99.99% availability SLA (Reference)

Get yourself a free Azure account here: Signup to Azure.

Crate a SQL Server instance

Just ensure you change the 'Compute + Storage' = 'General Purpose Gen5, 2vCores, 32Gb Storage' option.

  • Click 'Configure database'
  • Click 'Looking for basic, standard, premium?'
  • Choose 'Standard' and leave the DTUs slider to the left reading '10 (S0)'
  • Apply

The rest of the wizard is fairly self explanatory.

Once you have your database created, you can connect to it from SQL Server management Studio (SSMS) installed on your PC/Laptop using the database name and credentials you entered in the wizard. (Install from here)

Note: Your database name will be: <Your DB Name>.database.windows.net

Amazon AWS

AWS offers a micro SQL instance free for 12 months.

As with Azure, AWS manages the hardware, install and patching of your SQL instance so you can concentrate on your development.

The free tier includes:

  • Up to 10 Single-AZ db.t2.micro Instances...
  • SQL 2017 (as of 17/06/2020)
  • 20 GB of General Purpose (SSD) DB Storage
  • 20 GB of backup storage for your automated database backups and any user-initiated DB Snapshots
  • 1 vCPU
  • 1GiB Memory
  • 99.95% availability SLA (Reference)

Get yourself a free AWS account: Sign up to AWS

When you create an RDS instance, ensure you select:

  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • SQL Server Express
  • Free tier

Demo Data - Adventure Works

The good folks at Microsoft have created several versions of their Adventure Works database, available for free download.

This is the SQL equivalent of 'Hello World'. Great to get your teeth into some basic data and learn your way around.

To use this data, download the .bak file from the links below and restore to your SQL server.

Demo Data - Wide World Importers

If you need a change of scenary, Microsoft have created the Wide World Importers database, available for free download.

To use this data, download the .bak file from the link below and restore to your SQL server.

Demo Data - Stack Exchange

StackOverflow.com is a site for developers to share ideas and ask for help. If you're new to SQL Server, go there, you'll love it.

The StackOverflow team offered out a dump of anonymized data in .xml format and Microsoft MVP Brent Ozar was kind enough to translate that into a SQL database.

The 1Gb version expands to a 10Gb databse. Useful if you need to get your teeth into some larger data for performance tuning.

If you need to go even bigger, the 19Gb torrent expands to around a 137Gb database.

You can find Brent's original post here.

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