Consolidate your Enterprise instancesĪnother approach for reducing your licensing spend is to reduce the number of Enterprise Editions in your environment. If these requirements are acceptable, SQL Server Standard Edition may be sufficient for you. Restarts may be required when adjusting resources. Maintenance windows may be required to keep your indexes in order. Standard Edition’s resource constraints may require some getting used to by your users. Of course, not everything is that well defined. It’s not necessarily an easy lift, but it’s certainly doable and may be cost effective. We’ve also seen some organizations migrate to a PowerBI reporting environment and phase our their use of Data-driven Subscriptions in SSRS. (For more information, see High Availability and Disaster Recovery in SQL Server and How to Create SQL Server 2019 Failover Clustered Instances in Azure.)

For example, perhaps you can leverage Failover Clustered Instances as part of your HADR strategy rather than implementing Availability Groups. This is the obvious answer, right? If you can get away from using features that require Enterprise Edition, then you may be able to go with Standard Edition. Our customers typically look to three areas for reducing their licensing spend. So, given the high price tag of Enterprise Edition, it’s far better to use Standard Edition if you can. Here’s a list of the other scale differences between the two editions. And, the database engine can only use a maximum of 128 GB in Standard Edition. It’s CPU usage is limited to the lesser of 4 sockets or 24-cores. That’s not the case for Standard Edition. Enterprise Edition can use as much CPU and memory as the operating system can handle. SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition is only constrained by the operating system. One final noteworthy example is the ability to scale. Standard Edition simply doesn’t have those capabilities. SQL Server Reporting Services is available in both editions, however if you want to use Data-Driven subscriptions or a scale-out deployment, you’ll need Enterprise Edition. These features may be a luxury in some environments and a non-negotiable, must-have in other organizations.Īnother example of feature discrepancy in the editions may be found in the reporting capabilities. But only the Enterprise Edition provides Always On availability groups (AGs), online index creation and rebuilds, and the ability to hot add memory and CPU. Both can handle heavy workloads, provide a secure data infrastructure, and offer a broad swath of data-related components.īut there some notable differences in the feature sets of each edition.įor example, both editions have HADR options such as Always On failover cluster instances (FCIs), accelerated database recovery, log shipping, and backup compression. It has many of the same features and capabilities found in the more expensive counterpart. Generally speaking, Microsoft designed SQL Server Standard Edition to meet the needs of many, if not most, small and medium-sized organizations.

What’s the difference in SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Editions? What makes Enterprise Edition so much more expensive? Let’s compare. There may be, but even so, Enterprise Edition is not inexpensive, especially if your workload requires 16, 32, 64, or more cores, and you have a multitude of instances. How expensive? According to Microsoft’s web site, the price for SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition is currently $13,748 for a 2-core pack, whereas the Standard Edition is $3,586. SQL Server Enterprise Edition is expensive. That’s a question most every CFO, CIO, VP, and Director with a SQL Server environment and budgetary responsibilities has asked. Trusted Tech Team is a Microsoft solutions Partner in the following areas.“Do I really need the SQL Server Enterprise Edition license? Or will SQL Server Standard Edition work for us?” As active members in the IT community, we work to support our clients’ businesses and provide them with peace of mind. We go above and beyond the average software reseller because we built our business on trust. Our Account Managers and Distribution Team fulfills orders quickly and efficiently, giving our customers digital downloads in record time so they can move on to their next big project. TTT delivers unbeatable customer service, with experts in licensing and high-level technicians always on-call to answer your tech issues in-depth. Our relationship to the Microsoft Partner Network allows us to provide competitive pricing and authentic software and support, all with a much-needed human element.

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Microsoft sql server standard price