pkarklinНе стал заводить отдельную тему:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2016/03/31/microsoft-sql-server-developer-edition-is-now-free/ Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition is now free

Exciting news! Starting today, SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition is now a free download for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members. 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. SQL Server Developer Edition is for development and testing only, and not for production environments or for use with production data.

Visual Studio Dev Essentials is Microsoft’s most comprehensive free developer program ever, with everything you need to build and deploy your app on any platform, including state-of-the-art tools, the power of the cloud, training, and support.

SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition offers the full feature set of SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition, and allows you to build almost any kind of data solution on top of SQL Server. SQL Server 2014 delivers mission critical performance across all workloads with in-memory with in-memory built-in, faster insights from any data with familiar tools, and a platform for hybrid cloud enabling organizations to easily build, deploy, and manage solutions that span on-premises and cloud. It also delivers peace of mind with the fewest security vulnerabilities of any enterprise database six years in a row. [1] To learn more about the value proposition of SQL Server 2014, read the datasheet.

SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition, when released later this year, will also be free. To learn more about the exciting new features in SQL Server 2016, read the datasheet.
Круто.
Но теперь уже лучше 2016го подождать :)