Administration
Plans and licensing
Learn how SQL Flow is licensed, with capacity plans, capability packs, initial load allowances and support plans, and how capacity is measured.
SQL Flow is licensed per deployment, as an annual subscription. A subscription combines a capacity plan, the capability packs your deployment needs, and a support plan. SQL Flow is never priced by CPU, worker, event, pipeline, endpoint, connector or agent.
For current plans and prices, see spectralcore.com/sqlflow or contact sales@spectralcore.com. Your signed order form and agreement govern your subscription.
Capacity plans
There are four plans: Core, Production, Scale and Enterprise. Each plan sets four ceilings:
| Ceiling | What it limits |
|---|---|
| Initial load and backfill rate | How fast initial loads, table reloads and resyncs copy data |
| Initial load and backfill volume | How much data those copies move per year: the plan's annual allowance |
| CDC data rate | The volume of captured changes per second, across the licensed deployment |
| CDC change rate | The number of captured changes per second, across the licensed deployment |
Enterprise has custom ceilings. Custom capacity extensions are also available between plans that share the same capabilities.
Both CDC ceilings apply at once: a workload stays within the data rate and the change rate. Sustained use above either one calls for a higher plan or a capacity extension. There are no CDC usage overage charges.
What every plan includes
- Log-based CDC: continuous capture, with the read-only log broker for a high-security setup.
- Initial load and backfill: bulk copies within the plan's rate and annual allowance. See Initial load.
- Schema evolution: detection and propagation of supported schema changes. See Schema evolution.
- Parallel execution: parallel capture, processing and delivery within the licensed capacity.
- Unlimited topology: no limit on pipelines, sources, targets, agents, relay agents or workers.
- Connectors and operations: the standard source and target connectors, monitoring, alerting, the audit log and recovery.
Capability packs
A capability pack adds a capability to the whole deployment. Packs are annual and per deployment.
| Pack | What it adds | Available with |
|---|---|---|
| Distributed acceleration | Relay agents at the edge or in the cloud, and WAN optimization | Core, Production, Scale, Enterprise |
| High availability | Failover, clustered operation and passive standby | Production, Scale, Enterprise |
| Bidirectional replication | Active-active replication, loop prevention and conflict policies | Scale, Enterprise |
| Air-gapped deployment | Offline licensing, for a deployment with no internet access | Scale, Enterprise, with the Premium or Mission Critical support plan |
Initial load and backfill allowance
- Each plan includes an annual allowance of initial load and backfill volume. You can buy more volume, by the TiB.
- Bulk copies don't consume CDC entitlements, and CDC doesn't consume the bulk allowance.
- The allowance resets at renewal. Unused volume doesn't carry forward.
Support plans
| Plan | Coverage | Priority 1 response |
|---|---|---|
| Business | 8×5, business hours | 4 hours |
| Premium | 24×7 | 2 hours |
| Mission Critical | 24×7, with a named technical owner | 30 minutes |
Support is priced as a share of the annual subscription.
How capacity is measured
- The greater side counts. Usage is the larger of your total source-side and target-side traffic.
- Fan-out is included. Writing the same changes to more targets is included, and endpoints are free.
- Relay traffic isn't counted. Compressed traffic to relay agents doesn't count toward usage.
- Bursts are allowed. Limits are checked as a 15-minute rolling average. Short spikes up to twice your plan's capacity are allowed for up to 60 seconds.
- No surprise bills. Sustained use above a limit calls for a plan upgrade or a capacity extension, never an unexpected CDC consumption invoice.
Capacity is aggregated across the production instances named in your order form.
Activation
You enter no license key when you install the control plane, an agent, a log broker or the CLI. Both deployment models run the same agents, log brokers, capture modes, targets and features.
- Hybrid. Your deployment is licensed through your Spectral Core subscription.
- Air-gapped. The control plane is activated offline and never contacts a licensing service. Take its hardware fingerprint, a short text snippet, to a machine with internet access and activate it on the Spectral Core licensing server. Then paste the server's response into the air-gapped control plane. Offline activation comes with the Air-gapped deployment pack.
What admits a machine to your account is its join code and your approval, not a license. See Agents. Each agent and broker release is supported for 12 months; see Upgrades and restarts.
