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Question regarding Enterprise Edition vs. Standard Edition of SQL Server 2005

  • May 31, 2006 at 9:01 am

    #169083

    Hello,

    On the same machine would there be any performance increase when using Enterprise edition over Standard edition?  I have evaluated enterprise edition and while the additional features are nice, we are having a hard time justifying the additional cost of enterprise edition for a deployment project we are working on.  Anyone have any feedback on this?

    Thanks,

    MDB

  • May 31, 2006 at 10:12 am

    #640984

    In my experience only if you're going to be making use of some of the performance enhancing features of Enterprise edition. A couple of the higher-end index operations only work on enterprise edition as well as certain types of report caching in reporting services. Also the ability to use higher-end hardware (more than 4 CPUs) is limited

    The query engine is the same however so for most basic operations you probably won't see any difference.

  • June 1, 2006 at 8:22 am

    #641193

    Especially with 2005, there are fewer and fewer reasons why you would need Enterprise over Standard. I am surprised not more is being written about this. Many of us have needed EE in the past, and no longer do, but will no doubt spend the extra $$ because it represents a "safe" decision.

    Some online operations (like restore and re-indexing) are only in EE, and mirroring, and clustering limitations exist (2 nodes only in SE), but if you don’t use this…

    Also, there is some interesting discrepancies in processor limitations. As of the April release of BOL, standard no longer appears to have a limit on processors, yet the MS site http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/features/compare-features.mspx still shows the limit at 4. You may want to check that out further.

    Check

    ms-help://MS.SQLCC.v9/MS.SQLSVR.v9.en/instsql9/html/6445fd53-6844-4170-a86b-7fe76a9f64cb.htm for comparisons.

    In many instances, even workgroup will suffice. Also, you may want to completely review your licensing model. Many dbas do not. Processor licensing is not always the best way to go.

    Matt you are to be commended for examining the true need in detail. And don't let MS give you a bunch of BS on why you should stay with EE.

    Terry

  • June 1, 2006 at 9:15 am

    #641210

    Thanks for the replys, looks like standard edition is going to be the ticket

    MDB

  • February 6, 2007 at 9:14 am

    #688074

    Has anyone figured out how to calculated the value of online indexing and restore? Is there a white paper on this?

    -Robert

  • February 6, 2007 at 11:27 am

    #688116

    I agree with Terry that standard or even workgroup edition would be sufficient in most cases. Enterpise Edition has some extra  scalability and availabilty features and also more features for data mining. The only real performance advantage (other than possible use of more processors) can be achieved by table partitioning.

    About online index features I don't see it that much as an performance improvement. Yes, you wil have less locking when rebuilding an index, but in most cases this happens during low activity times anyway. Also online reindexing is not possible if your index contains any LOB columns, which can be a problem with clustered indexes.

    Online restore is limited and I yet have to come along a situation where I would consider doing it. Your need to plan very carefully the database design and placement of filegroups to avoid possible inconsistencies. So most of the time we would rather restore data from a copy of the database.

    Markus

    [font="Verdana"]Markus Bohse[/font]

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