Sorry, I wasn't making that clear. It's not that it isn't a factor, they clearly think it is. The question is how big a factor is it really? My experience is that the licens is less of an issue, compared to the time and resources you'd otherwise need to redesign everything.

When Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky started Stack Overflow they had a podcast. In that podcast Joel repeatably argued that hardware wasn't that expensive, compared to Jeffs time. His argument was that buying a larger server and scaling that way was much more cost-effective. I think that's still true, to a point, even if you didn't have the licensing cost.

> [...] buying a larger server and scaling that way was much more cost-effective. I think that's still true, to a point, even if you didn't have the licensing cost.

I don't know if in the cloud world this still holds true, considering that (at least in AWS) if you vertical scale 2x you get usually a 2x price increase. Clearly I'm not factoring costs of making an app horizontally scalable or DB-shards aware (which I think was always the main selling point for SO vertical scaling: they usually referred to the DB, and they were against sharding)

> Because we went with the reliability of a full Microsoft stack

As opposed to what? What reliability are they worried about trading off?

Don't get me wrong - I love C# and .NET, and MSSQL is a fantastic RDBMS. And if your people already are familiar with this tech stack (which I think is the case here), it makes sense to play to strengths.

But let's not pretend that this stack is the more reliable option to any other alternative...

Stack Overflow started in 2008, what exactly were performant alternatives back then? Java EE + Oracle/Postgres?

Cannot comment on reliability, but considering .NET and MSSQL are from the same company, I'd assume they work great together.

That was just a few years after Postgres became competitive.

Postgres was already a better choice than Oracle or SQL Server on almost every way (the clustering setup UX sucked). But very few people were aware of that, and they would have to learn a completely new stack to use it.

I don't know if SO is using everything that comes with MSSQL, but it's a lot more than just a RDBMS. SSIS for example is a full workflow/job execution environment fully integrated with MSSQL. When I did a similar analysis to move off of MSSQL in the past, there is a lot more to it than just swapping out databases.

In our case we were also using MSAS and SSRS.

SSIS, MSAS and SSRS are minimally functional products that exist from stopping MS customers from looking elsewhere. If they are adding value to you (instead of just being demanded from the high up and never used), it's better to look at the alternatives, some times even if you are already paying for them (that one is a difficult decision, as the others are kinda expensive).

Anyway, the Microsoft implementation of data workflows is so stupid that you are better of with manual dblinks or creating the entire thing in a general purpose language. Their largest competitors share a lot of the same problems, so I'd say that workflow software is just an excuse to hire low-paid professionals and a real drag on any working development team.

I worked at the MySpace parent company during the whole growth explosion. Microsoft would send us custom MSSQL patches to fix issues the team was running into. Sure, someone could have patched an open source database but not everyone wants or needs to staff engineers of every category.

It's probably only costs for SQL Server, because anything else (ASP.NET, .NET, C#, etc.) is free and open source.

You couldn't run ASP.NET in Linux back then, so you had to pay for a Windows license, too.

Stack Overflow predates any of those being open source.

Wouldn't they have to pay for IIS as well? (Not mentioning Windows itself?)

Windows server yes, you pay for that, but IIS comes bundled.