PATSTAT Global bulk data - licensing of MS SQL Server

[confusion]

Dear all,

I am planning to acquire PATSTAT Global (autumn 2021 edition). My university has a department server where I can put the data. I have a few questions before I actually make the purchase:

1) it seems I need some form of DBMS to efficiently use the database (my endgame would be extracting data and analysing it in R). And mostly I see MS SQL Server 2017 to be used to manage the data. My department server does not have this software. While it seems that it should be free to use for single users, would someone know whether there are costs (and if yes, how high) in installing it on a department server?
(on that note, I am also unsure what or whether there is a difference to SSMS)

2) Can I host and unzip the data, given that it's huge, on a server without it causing problems to other databases on it? I have seen the concept of clustering in relation to it but am not familiar with the concept (and/or costs of implementing assuming I need another server?!), neither am I even sure whether something like this is required or would be useful...

If anyone has some clarifications on any of this, I'd highly appreciate!
Take care and thank you!!

[EPO / PATSTAT Support]

Hello Confusion,
On (1): to use PATSTAT Global bulk, you will need to install the PATSTAT source files on some kind of data base platform. MSSQL is often used, but MySQL (and others) are also fine. Many universities use MySQL because MySQL is a free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. We always recommend students to ask for help from the IT department or a DB administrator. PATSTAT needs about 500GB of storage space if you want to load all the files (and a bit more if you want to keep the CSV source files). Many users skip the tls202_appln_title and tls203_appln_abstr to reduce the size, basically, you could install only the tables you really need for your research. Just for info: PATSTAT can just as well be installed on a laptop or free standing computer if there is no need to share the data base with other students or researchers. And you could also install it "in the cloud", but that (mostly) involves some extra costs as well. Once it is installed, you will also need to have some SQL knowledge to "work" the data. (SSMS is the front end application to work with the Microsoft SQL server.)
On (2): that is difficult to answer, if your PATSTAT data base occupies the last free MB's on the server storage, it might very well give problems for other data bases (users). You need to discuss this with the server administrator or your DB administrator responsible for your platform.

At the very bottom end: if you are the only one who will need to use the data, you could just as well use a good laptop, install MySQL (and R) and then load PATSTAT. That will work fine for a single user, but you need to have some DB skills.

Depending on the nature of your research, maybe PATSTAT Online could offer a solution and then you don't need to do any installation at all.