Datasheet

Chapter 1

Standard Edition

The Standard Edition is the mainstream edition of SQL Server. This is the edition that's going to be

installed for the majority of SQL Server users. The Standard Edition supports multiprocessing with up

to four CPUs and 2GB of RAM. However, it doesn't support some of the more advanced features. For

example, only a subset of the Analysis Services features is supported. You need to purchase a separate

license for each Standard Edition instance you install on a machine.

Developer Edition

Readers of this book will probably see the Developer Edition as the default installation. Enterprise and

Standard Editions should be seen as the production server solution, with developing and testing of

applications performed on the Developer Edition. This has all the features of the Enterprise edition and,

therefore, once a solution has been developed using the Developer Edition, there should be no

problems in moving this to a production environment.

The only difference between this edition and the Enterprise Edition is the licensing of the product – the

Developer Edition can only be used as a development environment.

Enterprise Edition

To run the Enterprise Edition, you must have NT Enterprise Edition, Windows 2000 Advanced Server,

or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server installed. SQL Server Enterprise Edition adds support for

multiprocessing with up to 32 CPUs, there is support for clustering (where two separate servers provide

fail-over and can otherwise share a workload), and it allows for HTTP access to OLAP cubes (cubes are

fully described in Chapter 25).

Whether to go with Enterprise Edition or not is usually an easy choice because the outcome is almost

always decided for you, based on a requirement for one of the Enterprise Edition features, or costs and

licensing (the per-processor license for the Enterprise Edition is four times the price of that for the

Standard Edition). If you need clustering, then you need the Enterprise Edition. Enterprise edition

special features include:

❑ Clustering

❑ Distributed partitioned views

❑ Indexed views

❑ Partitioned cubes

❑ Support for more than 4GB of RAM

❑ Log shipping (a fail-over strategy)

❑ Support for more than 4 CPUs

In addition, there is a long list of more obscure features that are only supported in the Enterprise

edition, but it would be rare that one of those is needed if you don't also need one of the above items.

Basically, if you need one of these, then you need Enterprise edition – it's that simple.