You might already read lots of post about SQL server 2012 is license per core rather then per socket and there are limitation on standard edition on 16 core and 64Gb RAM. I'm not going to go through those as I'm sure you already read about them. What I will point out is that there might be things that can help you to think about your licenses again.

If you are working in one of those companies that doesn't want to buy Enterprise license because of financial reasons, and they *thinks* that they do not need those extra feature. You are out of luck!! Most companies I heard is that they are running a small-mid size DB, that they do not require more then two cluster *ever*, and always can have downtime for index maintenance (in fact, never did index maintenance), and they would be fine with the memory limits and their hardware does not require more then 8 cores anyway. That is perfectly fine, it just that when they starts to want some feature down the road, and found all those limitations they have, you will see all the developers and DBA are scratching their heads. I won't want to mention their suggestion of using old SQL version just because they can use more RAM, please don't go down that path!!!

But in fact, what is good thing (apart from the new features) that you might be missed is that with SQL 2014, even with Standard edition, you can have up to 128Gb memory per instance *Yeah!!!* So even if you are not planning to use and of those new feature of SQL 2014, it might be best to install it for new projects since you can use more memory, not much features got discontinued, you can get more benefits then the negative.

If you are in those companies that willing to pay for Enterprise edition, there are other factor you need to consider. One that you might also missed is that for the per core licenses, it does not count hyper-threading, it count only the physical core! It means if you have a 8-core processor, you only have to buy 8 licenses for SQL and logically can use 16-cores. There are many debate on whether HT should be enable, but many research shows that it can have performance gain for common workload. You might have to test it for your own workload, but at the end of the day, its free, its only up to you to have it or not.

One last point is that on clustering (HA/DR), we all understand that for active-active servers, both nodes needs to be licensed. However, only 1 passive node is cover for each active license. So if you have a 3-node cluster with only one instance, you plan to have HA and DR with whatever technology (clustering, Avail group, log shipping, mirroring), you will need to have two licenses instead of one. Something to watch out for when you are planning for new servers.

I do strongly advise to have enterprise edition of SQL 2014 on new projects, as you will never know what you will run into, and you can have more tools ready for you to use. But in some cases where you know the application is very small, and do not require lots of attention, standard edition might work just fine.

If you are planning for your new project next time, you might have to add more to your consideration then the already complex choice of Standard vs Enterprise 🙂