Understanding the value of the Enterprise Edition, one feature at a time

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This is something I planned to start a while ago and never found the time to do it properly. The idea behind this series of posts is to highlight what are all those benefits which are only available in the Enterprise Edition. Not only the ones well renown and advertised by our marketing folks, but also those subtle tough extremely powerful and beneficial hidden jewels which are typically just ignored because they are difficult to explain.

It is so common to hear SQL Server users saying: "Why would I want to choose the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server if the Standard edition also supports failover clustering?"

To be honest, that simplistic assertion knocks me out. :-P

First of all, it isn't true that failover clustering support was the only difference between Standard and Enterprise editions in previous versions. There was much more than that. But we won't touch the SQL Server 2000 topic eleven years after its release. That wouldn't be of too much value for you. Instead, we prefer to focus in SQL Server 2008 R2.

In the current release there is so much extra value in the Enterprise Edition, that we prefer to believe that those users who agree with the statement above, is just because they haven't really been explained what all that value is, which form it adopts within the product, and how they can actually benefit from it.

For that reason, I feel it's our obligation to show you all these benefits, using simple and clear examples or pointing to already existing ones that typically forget to mention the feature being exposed requires the Enterprise Edition to benefit from it. The aim is helping you to take better decisions when it comes to choosing the most appropriate edition of SQL Server to satisfy your business requirements.

So, keep tuned and don't miss any of those deliveries if you want to make the best decisions. Winking smile

Every post in this series will be published on Fridays and the most current list will be kept updated and linked from this post.