August 24, 2010 at 1:54 pm
We're going to be upgrading from 2005 to 2008. Currently our servers are running Standard Edition. As a DBA, I would like to have Enterprise Edition, but it looks like it would be about $12,500 additional for us.
I'm curious what others have found to be the most significant features in Enterprise that justify the extra cost.
August 24, 2010 at 2:02 pm
I'm still "stuck" on standard. The only usefull feature that I could take advantage of is online indexing / defrag.
For SSRS I'd like to use a few options like choose dynamically who gets the report depending on weird business rules.
Nothing worth making the upgrade for us nor justifying the budget.
August 24, 2010 at 4:23 pm
partitioning, transparent data encryption, data\backup compression, indexed views,online restores, .......etc
Depends on features you are going to need. Chances are if you have managed with 2005 Std so far then 2008 Std will possibly suffice!
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August 24, 2010 at 4:30 pm
We take advantage of two: online reindex and compression (data and backup). Just those features are worth it in my opinion.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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August 25, 2010 at 8:13 am
Perry Whittle (8/24/2010)
partitioning, transparent data encryption, data\backup compression, indexed views,online restores, .......etcDepends on features you are going to need. Chances are if you have managed with 2005 Std so far then 2008 Std will possibly suffice!
I dunno about that. First off, very few of the new 2008 features that anyone cares about (DATE data type aside) are in Standard; more and more the good stuff is Enterprise only. So from a financial perspective, I don't know what you gain from 2005-2008 if it is just a Standard to Standard migration. Doesn't seem worth it.
Plus, I forget what they were, but seems to me that something that was on Standard in 2005 wasn't in 2008, so you might actually lose some functionality you depend upon.
More and more MS is pushing us to Enterprise as the default install for better or worse for all but small shops.
August 25, 2010 at 9:00 am
I have compared these before and there seems little difference. You can check the comparisons at these links
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/compare-features.aspx#scalability
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/editions-compare.aspx
There are some items in Enterprise only but they werent there in 2005 anyway. Items such as TDE, Resource Governor, data compresssion!
Memory and CPU support has changed for the worse though
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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉
August 25, 2010 at 9:34 am
In the past the big reasons I've gone with Enterprise is scalability (larger CPU/RAM limits). Now there is less of that, but other features. If you can take advantage of those features, like compression or Resource Governor, then it might be worth it.
you can use Developer edition to load your db, test things like compression, and see if there is value.
August 25, 2010 at 9:40 am
The reason we chose Enterprise is because it supports semi-additive measures in datawarehousing. There are work-arounds for standard but they take a lot of extra work.
August 27, 2010 at 9:54 am
Used to be a lot easier to justify. Like others have said already, it's really based on your needs vs your budget.
So I'll just add my personal experience. Below are the justifications we've been able to use "in the real world":
(in order of reason for acceptance)
1) High Availability/Disaster Recovery:
Database Mirroring (which I personally love), for some ungodly reason, only supports Asynchronous/High Performance mode under the Enterprise license. Otherwise, you're stuck with High Safety mode and effectual two-phase commits. Across a WAN, this just isn't an option (unless you got $$$, but then you wouldn't be worried about Std vs Ent, would you :-D)
2) Backup/Data compression:
Particularly backup compression. This has made it possible for many servers due to the size of native backups and required retention periods exceeding the available space without it.
3) Appetite for PowerPivot (for SharePoint):
Requires Enterprise to run this for the end users.
4) Commodity Limits:
Many of our boxes require more procs and RAM than Standard supports.
5) Online Index rebuilds:
24x7 systems with "no maintenance windows". Need I say more? 🙁
August 27, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Compression saves you a TON of disk space, and you can compare cost savings there for backups on your SAN, tapes, etc.
Also, if you already happen to use 3rd party backup software for compression (litespeed or otherwise), you can now drop that license cost from your budget if you go with enterprise.
Once you factor those in, the difference isn't a flat 12,500...there's also other intangibles that you can't put a price on, like online reindexing, asynchronous mirroring, and others that were already mentioned here.
August 27, 2010 at 4:20 pm
costs for 3rd party backup software are not that excessive. I prefer the rigidity that SQLBackup offers rather than using native backup compression
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August 27, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Derrick Smith (8/27/2010)
Compression saves you a TON of disk space, and you can compare cost savings there for backups on your SAN, tapes, etc.
I agree. We just finished a migration for our data warehouse which was 28TB from SQL 2000 ENT to SQL 2008 ENT. After implementing page level compression for everything (we had the CPU overhead) we dropped down to 14TB. Performance also increased due to less IO and compression in memory.
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