SQL SERVER 2008 Top 20 Enterprise only Features

Overview.

You can find many articles, white papers, and books demonstrating the myriad features found in SQL Server 2008.

However it is sometimes easy to forget that there’s a big disparity in the features that the different editions of SQL Server 2008 support.

Chances are that the exciting new features you’re reading about are supported only by

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition or SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition.

(Although Enterprise Edition and Developer Edition share the same feature set, Developer Edition is licensed solely for development work and can’t be used for production work.)

The following is a list of the 20 most important features.

1       Hot-add CPU. 

Recognizes newly added CPUs without a restart.

2       Hot-add RAM 

Recognizes additional RAM without a restart.

3       More instances. 

Up to 50 named instances (other editions support only 16).

4       Data Compression. 

Automatically compresses database data.

5       Transparent Database Encryption. 

Encrypts databases without making application changes.

6       Resource Governor. 

Allocates system resources per workload.

7       Partitioning.

Divides large tables and indexes into multiple file groups for better performance.

8       Partition Table Parallelism.

Uses separate threads for queries over multiple partitions.

9       Asynchronous Mirroring Mode.

SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition supports only Synchronous database mirroring.

10    More Fail-over Clustering Nodes.

 Up to 16 nodes (Standard Edition supports two nodes)

11    Database Snapshots.

For capturing point-in time database copies.

12    Fast Recovery.

System availability at the end of the transaction-log roll-forward phase.

13    On-line Indexing.

Rebuilds indexes while the base table is in use.

14    On-line Restore.

Restores file groups while a database is active.

15    Distributed Partitioned Views.

Creates scale-out clusters by dividing tables between multiple SQL Server systems.

16    Filtered Indexes.

Lets you selectively index column values.

17    Oracle Replication Publishing.

Lets Oracle act as replication publisher.

18    Peer-to Peer (P2P) Transactional Replication.

Replicates data changes to all nodes on the network.

19    Advanced Transformations.

Adds SQL Server Integration Services transformations such as Fuzzy Lookup and Data Mining.

20    Change Data Capture.

Ability to track changes on a table and capture them to a mirrored table.