Which version of SQL 2008 do you use?

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As the school year winds down and summer projects for education customers heat up I am getting several customers asking about the “right” version of SQL.  Specifically why use Enterprise over Standard.

A comparison of the feature differences of the various versions of SQL found here.

In short it comes down to performance improvements, high availability improvements, cost savings with compression, improvements in database maintenance for mission critical systems, and  taking advantage of all the BI features and being able to scale those features to large user bases. 

Bob Duffy wrote an excellent overview and I recommend reading his full post can be found here.  I have summarized some of his information below.

Quick list of reasons for choosing Enterprise Edition for your deployment

  • More than a two node cluster (such as 3+ nodes)
  • Utilize more than 4 cpu sockets
  • Database Mirroring enchancements (multithreaded mirroring)
  • Database compression
  • Web Farm for Reporting Services
  • Partitioning, table or cubes.
  • Advanced BI features
  • The list goes on..