“Do I really need the SQL Server Enterprise Edition license? Or will SQL Server Standard Edition work for us?”

That’s a question most every CFO, CIO, VP, and Director with a SQL Server environment and budgetary responsibilities has asked.

The reason is obvious. SQL Server Enterprise Edition is expensive. 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.

Oh, but there are discounts, you say. 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.

What makes Enterprise Edition so much more expensive? Let’s compare.

What’s the difference in SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Editions?

Generally speaking, Microsoft designed SQL Server Standard Edition to meet the needs of many, if not most, small and medium-sized organizations. It has many of the same features and capabilities found in the more expensive counterpart. Both can handle heavy workloads, provide a secure data infrastructure, and offer a broad swath of data-related components.

But there some notable differences in the feature sets of each edition.

For example, both editions have HADR options such as Always On failover cluster instances (FCIs), accelerated database recovery, log shipping, and backup compression. 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. These features may be a luxury in some environments and a non-negotiable, must-have in other organizations.

Another example of feature discrepancy in the editions may be found in the reporting 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. Standard Edition simply doesn’t have those capabilities.

One final noteworthy example is the ability to scale. SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition is only constrained by the operating system. Enterprise Edition can use as much CPU and memory as the operating system can handle. That’s not the case for Standard Edition. It’s CPU usage is limited to the lesser of 4 sockets or 24-cores. And, the database engine can only use a maximum of 128 GB in Standard Edition.

Here’s a list of the other scale differences between the two editions.

Reducing your licensing costs

So, given the high price tag of Enterprise Edition, it’s far better to use Standard Edition if you can. Our customers typically look to three areas for reducing their licensing spend.

Avoid using Enterprise Edition features

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. For example, perhaps you can leverage Failover Clustered Instances as part of your HADR strategy rather than implementing Availability Groups. (For more information, see High Availability and Disaster Recovery in SQL Server and How to Create SQL Server 2019 Failover Clustered Instances in Azure.)

We’ve also seen some organizations migrate to a PowerBI reporting environment and phase our their use of Data-driven Subscriptions in SSRS. It’s not necessarily an easy lift, but it’s certainly doable and may be cost effective.

Of course, not everything is that well defined. Standard Edition’s resource constraints may require some getting used to by your users. Maintenance windows may be required to keep your indexes in order. Restarts may be required when adjusting resources. If these requirements are acceptable, SQL Server Standard Edition may be sufficient for you.

Consolidate your Enterprise instances

Another approach for reducing your licensing spend is to reduce the number of Enterprise Editions in your environment. If you currently have six Enterprise Edition instances each with 16 cores, maybe you can consolidate down to three 24-core Enterprise instances? Or even two 32-core instance and an 8-core instance.

There are a lot of factors involved in a consolidation project. Which databases will play nicely with the others? Which vendors have access and/or other requirements that make it difficult to have a shared instance?

You should also consider how you’re using AGs in your environment. If secondary replicas are used for any production activity, even as mundane running backups, they must be licensed as production. If the secondary replicas are simply waiting for the primary to fail so they can get into the game, then typically they do not have to be licensed. NOTE: licensing is complex and can change. Please consult a licensing expert before making final decisions.

Optimize your configuration and applications

Throwing hardware at a problem is not uncommon. With the stroke of a pen, we can add CPU or memory to relieve unpleasant SQL symptoms. Users are complaining of slowness? Add memory. That didn’t work? Add CPU or faster storage. That worked? Good enough.

Adding resources can cover a multitude of sins. But at some point, all those additional resources add up.

Perhaps you can reduce your need for Enterprise Edition’s resources by optimizing what you have. Assess your SQL Servers to see if they are configured properly and in accordance with best practices. Review the query plans and tune the most egregious resource hogs. Investigate to ensure you have the right indexing strategy in place. Check your tempdb to ensure its configured optimally. Like some help assessing your SQL Servers? We can help.

By the way, this approach is also good for Standard Edition, especially when the applications are in the cloud.

So, do you really need SQL Server Enterprise Edition?

Is the Enterprise Edition worth all that extra money? Perhaps.

Can you satisfy your objectives with Standard? Again maybe. If you can, that’s definitely the way to go. There’s no point in spending the money on licensing when you don’t have to.

It all really depends on your needs and if you can effectively reduce your spend while maintaining the level of performance and reliability your users require.

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