Limited to 32GB per instance on Standard Edition, 352MB on Express.Ģ. They just don't really gain much from moving to a more recent version and, in many cases, the cost of testing a migration and dealing with regressions actually outweighs any benefits.Ĭolleagues like Brent Ozar and Steve Jones have had similar thoughts – arguing that the best features remain excluded from Standard and lower editions for revenue reasons, but this isn't the way it should be. Adoption rates are slow because, in many respects, Standard Edition upgrades have been far from compelling in recent years, meaning many people are content with their 2012 Standard instances.Currently, they either need to write multiple codebases, or simply surrender to the lowest common denominator. Both vendors and customers also want to be able to use features that are available in both cloud and box, regardless of tier or edition. Similarly, customers want to use the same codebase in their QA, production, and development environments, but those may not all have the same edition either. In current versions, when a vendor wants to take advantage of compression or partitioning, they have to consider that not all of their customers will be using Enterprise Edition.

Programmability features that moonlight as performance features – like data compression and partitioning – are arguably on the Enterprise side of things, even though I've always felt data compression's sweet spot is the small business who can't afford to just add memory, buy faster disks, or upgrade to Enterprise.The implicit message was that, if you're a small business, you don't need to be able to encrypt credit card data (they say the same with Transparent Data Encryption, but Always Encrypted is a much more valuable offering).

It should be in all editions I was disappointed when Always Encrypted was released and it was restricted to Enterprise.

Data security seems to have taken a back seat in recent years.

Here are some reasons and consequences of putting so many critical features only in Enterprise, at least in my opinion: While they did add some functionality around Availability Groups (limited support in Standard Edition, and the ability to forego a domain), many of the features that are currently Enterprise only don't seem to be Enterprise-y at all. The latter is already the case with Express Edition (1 CPU, 1 GB memory, 10 GB database size) and Standard Edition (24 cores, 128 GB), but features themselves simply don't exist there. I've long been an advocate of making the surface area the same across all editions, and restricting each edition to hardware/resource limits.

Sql server 2016 express localdb