What’s in Enterprise only? (Updatable Distributed Partitioned Views)

SQL Server can use read-only distributed partitioned views as a scale out mechanism, but any attempt to update any of these heterogeneous objects will fail with error 4451 (Views referencing tables on multiple servers are not updatable in the edition of this SQL Server instance '%.*ls'. See books online for more details on feature support in different SQL Server editions. ) unless you’re using the Enterprise Edition (or a Developer Edition or an Evaluation Edition, both of which behave exactly like the Enterprise does. The only difference among them three is their licensing.)

This post is part of the a series I decided to call “Understanding the value of the Enterprise Edition, one feature at a time” which I started in September 2011 and will grow on a weekly basis, having a new post incorporated to the family every Friday.