• Chart: SQL Server 2005 Editions at a Glance

The SQL Server 2005 product lineup will feature stronger products at the low end, including a replacement for the venerable (and free) Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine (MSDE), and a new Workgroup Edition for small customers. The existing Standard and Enterprise Editions will remain in the lineup, although prices will generally rise about 20%. The expanded product line opens new scenarios, particularly for smaller sites—and complications, such as a new model for Client Access Licenses (CALs)—and customers will need to consider upgrade options carefully.

This article focuses on the distinguishing features of various SQL Server 2005 editions. Directions on Microsoft will cover SQL Server 2005 in more depth in future articles.

The New SQL Product Lineup

The SQL Server 2005 product lineup includes the following four major products:

• Express Edition, a free database that replaces MSDE
• Workgroup Edition, a scaled-down version of Standard Edition that lacks some advanced services and management tools
• Standard Edition, which builds on SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition but costs more
• Enterprise Edition, the most scalable and feature-rich edition, which also costs more than its predecessor.

(For a quick overview of the four editions, see the chart "SQL Server 2005 Editions at a Glance".)

Express Edition

The free Express Edition, like its predecessor, MSDE, uses the core SQL Server database engine, but lacks its management tools, advanced services (such as online analytical processing), and availability features (such as failover). Nevertheless, Express Edition improves on its predecessor. Most notably, Microsoft has removed MSDE’s "throttling" restriction, which degraded performance if the database handled more than five queries simultaneously. Express Edition is limited to running on a single processor with no more than 1GB of RAM (reduced from MSDE, which can access two processors and 2GB of RAM), but multiple instances can share that memory space. Each instance of Express Edition is limited to a database no larger than 4GB, up from MSDE's limit of 2GB.

Express Edition includes core SQL Server 2005 programming features, including stored procedures, XML, and support for the .NET Common Language Runtime. It supports basic import and export features, as did MSDE, but not data transforms during import.

Express Edition gains simple management and reporting tools that should make it more useful for beginning developers; novice database administrators; testing purposes; and small, simple, production databases. Express Manager is a simple management interface that supplements the command-line management tools in MSDE.

Express Edition lacks high availability features, such as mirroring, failover clustering, and backup log shipping.

A free beta of SQL Server Express Edition is currently available for download.

Workgroup Edition

The new Workgroup Edition will be useful in many situations previously served by SQL Server Standard Edition, but will cost slightly less.

Hardware constraints are closer to those of MSDE—two processors, with up to 3GB of RAM (MSDE supported 2GB)—but database size is unlimited.

Workgroup Edition is the lowest-priced version of SQL Server 2005 to include the new SQL Server Management Studio, which consolidates a wide range of management tools, including Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer, and others, into a single interface. Workgroup Edition supports SQL Server Integration Services (which replaces the previous Data Transformation Services) for import and export of data only; it does not support the prepackaged data transformation functions that are included in the Standard or Enterprise Editions. It also lacks advanced SQL Server Standard Edition features such as Analysis Services and Reporting Services, and high-availability features are limited to backup log shipping, in which records of all changes to one database can be applied to a duplicate database.

Like Standard Edition, Workgroup Edition can be licensed per processor or in a server/CAL mode. Estimated retail prices are slightly lower than those for SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition, at US$3,899 per processor (compared with US$4,999 for SQL 2000 Standard), or US$739 for a server license with five CALs and US$149 for additional CALs (compared with US$1,489 for SQL Server 2000 Standard with five CALs and US$179 for additional CALs). These are estimated retail prices; in practice, all SQL Server customers can easily qualify for volume discounts that should reduce prices by at least 20%.

With Workstation Edition, Microsoft has introduced a new server/CAL model that the company informally calls CAL differentiation. Workgroup Edition CALs will be priced about US$30 less than the CAL for Standard and Enterprise Editions, and can only be used with Workgroup Edition. (The Standard and Enterprise CAL can be used with any version of SQL Server.)

Microsoft will produce an early release of Workgroup Edition, based on SQL Server 2000 rather than SQL Server 2005, available in spring 2005. (SQL Server 2005 is expected in summer 2005.) This edition will lack some of the features of the SQL Server 2005 version, including backup log shipping and Management Studio (although it will include Enterprise Manager). The SQL Server 2000 version will be limited to 2GB of RAM.

Standard Edition

Standard Edition updates its SQL Server 2000 counterpart, maintaining the four-processor limit, but removing the 2GB memory cap. Versions for both Itanium and X86 64-bit will be available, giving access to vast amounts of memory.

Standard Edition includes add-ons developed for SQL Server 2000, including Analysis and Reporting Services, and Integration Services with a subset of the data transformation functions available in the Enterprise Edition. It supports Web services, full replication services, common high-availability features (such as two-node failover clustering), and basic data warehousing features, including data mining.

Per-processor licenses will rise 20%, to US$5,999, and per-server licenses (including 10 CALs) will rise 20%, to US$2,799. SQL Server 2000 Standard customers with Software Assurance (SA) in effect when the product is released (currently planned for summer of 2005) will get the upgrade at no extra charge.

Enterprise Edition

At the high end of the product lineup, Enterprise Edition removes most scalability limits, with support for an unlimited number of processors, unlimited database size, and database partitioning.

It includes numerous high-availability features. For example, online indexing allows database administrators to perform index operations (such as rebuilding an index) without taking the database offline. Its Integration Services features include advanced transforms, and it can replicate transactions with Oracle databases. It supports Microsoft’s full suite of data warehousing and business intelligence features.

Prices have risen about 20%, to US$24,999 per processor, and US$13,499 for a server with 25 CALs. SQL Server 2000 Enterprise customers with SA in effect when SQL Server 2005 is released will get the upgrade at no extra charge.

Analyzing the Changes

With the more capable Express Edition and the new Workgroup Edition, Microsoft strengthens its story for the small business market. With its improved management interface, Express Edition is more likely to find a place in small production databases and as an embedded database in basic business applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and inventory management. The major targets here are open source databases such as MySQL, which are available for free and which are rapidly gaining advanced database features, such as stored procedures.

Although prices for the existing versions of SQL Server are rising, the increases are modest, and in some cases substantially lower than those of competitors. For example, processors with multiple cores are expected to hit the market by the end of 2005, and while competitors Oracle and IBM have announced that they will treat additional cores as discrete processors for licensing purposes (doubling the licensing costs for a database running on a two-core processor, for instance), Microsoft will continue to license its software per processor, regardless of the number of cores.

In addition, the changes to Standard Edition are significant enough that it could gain market share in situations where customers previously required Enterprise Edition. With its ability to use any practical amount of physical memory on 64-bit processors and Microsoft’s multicore licensing rules, customers could find that Standard Edition running on four dual-core 64-bit processors can handle all their capacity requirements, although Enterprise Edition’s superior high-availability features still make it the best choice in mission-critical scenarios.

Licensing Changes

On the surface, the licensing changes implemented with SQL Server 2005 seem to be positive for customers. Microsoft has in the past allowed customers to keep an unlicensed copy of SQL Server running in passive mode, that is, as a machine to which a production server can fail over to in the event of a problem. Other products, such as Exchange, require failover servers to be fully licensed, although customers who purchase SA, Microsoft’s upgrade rights, can install additional, unlicensed copies on cold (turned off) standby servers intended for emergency use.

With SQL Server 2005, the company will further relax its licensing rules. For example, a passive server (i.e., not servicing user connections) that is not part of a cluster will not require a separate license even if it accepts logs from an active server. However, if the backup server has any production role, such as processing queries, it must be fully licensed.

The concept of CAL differentiation, in which Workgroup Edition CALs are priced differently from Standard Edition CALs, presents a bigger problem. This is the first time that Microsoft has used CAL differentiation: for most of its products that have Standard and Enterprise Editions, only the server licenses vary and the CAL used for both editions is identical. Some Microsoft Business Solutions products employ a reverse model: server licenses do not vary, but Standard and Enterprise desktop licenses are priced differently and offer different functionality.

By charging price differentials for both server licenses and CALs, Microsoft is, in effect, double-dipping: charging customers twice for additional capabilities when they upgrade, once in the form of a more costly server license and again in the form of a more costly CAL (which offers no additional functionality and is not even software). This model can be particularly costly when upgrading: customers who use server/CAL licensing (rather than per-processor licensing) will need to purchase both new server licenses and new CALs if they decide that they need to upgrade from Workgroup to Standard Edition, for example. (In the past, only the server license would need to be upgraded.)

For this reason, customers should be particularly wary of the SQL Server 2000 Workgroup Edition product. Although it will be available a few months earlier than the SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition, customers would need to purchase SA to get the upgrade to SQL Server 2005. Although SA offers up to three years of upgrades, the only upgrade customers are likely to receive in that time will be SQL Server 2005. But the cost of SQL Server 2000 Workgroup Edition with SA will exceed the cost of SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition without SA. Therefore, customers who know they want to upgrade to SQL Server 2005 should probably purchase SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition to begin with and forego SQL Server 2000 Workgroup Edition.

Resources

More information about SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and a link to a download of the beta, is at www.microsoft.com/sql/express.

Multicore licensing is described in "Multiple Cores, Single License" on page 10 of the Dec. 2004 Update.

SQL Server 2005 Integration Services is described in "Data Integration Improved in SQL Server 2005" on page 13 of the Dec. 2004 Update.