Comparing Standard Editions of SQL Server

RickHeiges — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Recently, I've been speaking with customers about upgrading SQL Server. At times, some customers have a lot of Standard Edition SQL Server 2005 / 2008 / 2008R2 in their organization and they want to see the features they get when upgrading to SQL Server 2012. Last week, I sent out some tweets to the #sqlhelp hashtag to see if someone has already put together a document or blog post about comparing the Standard Editions. I was unable to discover anything out there that really focuses just on Standard Edition. So I decided to put together a small table comparing the features based on the offical Edition features links like this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(v=sql.100).aspx

Category / Feature	2008	2008R2	2012	Comments
CPU / Cores	4 CPUs	4 CPUs	16 cores	Based on the assumption of 4 cores per CPU
RAM	64 GB	64 GB	64 GB
Max DB Size	524 PB	524 PB	524 PB
Server Core Support	No	No	Yes	Significantly Reduce Patching
DB Recovery Advisor	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
Failover Clustering	2-node	2-node	2-node
Backup Compression	No	Yes	Yes	New in 2008 R2
Automatic Corruption Recovery from Mirror	Yes	Yes	Yes	New Feature in 2008
Multi-Instance Support	16	50	50	Stand-Alone
Security – Basic Auditing	No	No	Yes	Still no Fine-Grained Auditing
Security – User Defined Server Roles	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
Contained Databases	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
Distributed Replay	No	No	Yes (1 client)	New Feature in 2012
SQL Server Data Tools	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
DTS Runtime	Yes	Yes	No	Removed in 2012
Enhanced Gauges / Charting / Maps in SSRS	Yes	Yes	Yes	New Feature in 2008
Enhanced Extended Events	No	No	Yes	New in 2012

Most of the things that you hear about when a new version of SQL Server is released is in Enterprise (or Data Center) Edition. Standard Edition is very solid. Upgrading from SQL 2005 Standard Edition to SQL 2012 Standard Edition yields a lot of nice features. As you would expect, upgrading to SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition from 2008/2008R2 does not yield as many benefits. Currently, most of the customers that I deal with have approximately half of their installed base on SQL Server 2005. They can capitalize on some nice features by upgrading to SQL Server 2012.

I know that there are probably even more things that I did not cover as benefits of upgrading from earlier Standard Editions to SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition. If so, please leave a comment and I will update the blog post.

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Comparing Standard Editions of SQL Server