My top Enterprise Only features in SQL Server 2008
I think some users may not like it when certain features are mentioned as they are available in Enterprise Edition aka 'Enterprise Only'! It is not so easy to provide the great features with a minimal or free cost for any product, hence the licensing cost is prominent to keep up the balance. I'm not going into detailed information on different editions that are available in SQL Server, such as Enterprise, Standard, Developer, Web and so on.
As you may be aware that since SQL Server 2008 version the installation wizard (setup bootstrapper) provides a single feature tree for installation of SQL Server components. Certain features that are defined following are defined as 'Enterprise only' :
- Database Engine
- Analysis Services
- Reporting Services
- Integration Services
- Replication
- Full-text search
Further to this you can find many articles, web references and Books Online demonstrating the features within SQL Server. All the installations are not same and every installation requirements vary based on your application needs. The product features different editions of SQL Server that accommodate the unique performance, runtime, and price requirements of organizations and individuals. So next time when you choose to install, take a look at the SQL Server components that you install also depend on your specific requirements.
Microsoft has documented and proved that certain Enterprise related features are too-good to deploy to obtain the scalability & availability for your application. In their own words: "SQL Server Enterprise is a comprehensive data platform that provides enterprise-class scalability, performance, high availability, and advanced business intelligence capabilities for running secure, business-critical applications".
As it stated in BOL Enterprise only features are readily available in Developer edition, which should not be used for Production purpose, at any cost. As it says on the 'tin' Developer Edition is licensed solely for Development work! So here is the list I wanted to list out my favourite of Enterprise Only features in SQL Server 2008:
- Hot-Add CPU - which is good that you need not restart the server to take the new settings into effect.
- Hot-Add Memory - which is similar to above feature that additional RAM is recognised straight away without a restart of Services.
- 50 Instances - you can install 50 named instances (1 default + 49 named instance on a server).
- Transparent Data Encryption - secure the data without changing the application code, better with EKM enablement.
- Resource Governor - Big brother in performance tuning methods.
- Partition Table parallelism - better usage of OS threads for queries over multiple partitions.
- Asynchronous Mirroring - one of the good one for High Availability side of support.
- 16 node clustering - feature of more 16 node failover support.
- Database Snapshots - capture point-in-time data of your database (not a log backup)
- Online Indexing - still a old chum from SQL Server 2005 , rebuilds the index online when base tables are in use by Application.
- Online Restore - a very good advantage when you divide your database in multiple filegroups, can be restored to keep database alive while other filegroups are restored.
- Filtered Indexes - you can perform selectively index column values.
- SSIS transformations - advanced transformations such as Fuzzy lookup and Data mining.
- Change Data Capture - track and trace your data changes with less hassle.
There are many more to compare between Enterprise and other editions within SQL Server, which I will cover in some other time.