Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

I.1.2. Understanding SQL Server's Editions

To the average database administrator or application developer examining the various editions of SQL Server, it might seem that someone in Microsoft's products marketing department stayed up late thinking about ways to befuddle them. Fortunately, things aren't as confusing as they might appear at first glance. In this section, we give you some quick guidelines you can use to determine the right edition for your specific needs. Note that because this book covers such a broad range of functionality, we used the Enterprise edition to fully highlight SQL Server's capabilities.

• Enterprise: This is the flagship of the entire SQL Server 2008 family. It includes a host of features that make it a good choice for a mission-critical database server platform. Just a few of these benefits are

  • No limit on CPUs (other than that imposed by the operating system)

  • Full data warehousing capabilities

  • Enterprise-wide management tools

  • Round-the-clock availability

  • Superior security features

  • High availability capabilities

• Standard: With much of the feature set of its big brother, this edition is fine for the vast majority of database applications, especially those with a departmental rather than an enterprise scope. The main difference is that this edition is lighter in its business intelligence, high availability, data warehousing, and enterprise-wide management feature sets.

• Workgroup: Aimed at smaller, departmental applications, this powerful edition of SQL Server ...