SQL Server 2012 Editions

SQL Server 2012 is available in three editions, which cumulatively add features.

Initial details surrounding the packaging and licensing of SQL Server 2012 were announced in Nov. 2011. Three existing editions of the product are being discontinued—Datacenter, Workgroup, and Standard for Small Business—with Datacenter to be subsumed by the Enterprise edition and the other two by the Standard edition.

SQL Server Standard, the entry-level edition of the SQL Server online transaction processing (OLTP) database, includes support for up to 16 CPU cores and basic high- availability functionality with 2-node failover clustering. It includes the SQL Server Data Tools (development tools integrated into Visual Studio 2010), the multidimensional online analytic processing business intelligence (BI) technology included in earlier versions of SQL Server, as well as SQL Server Reporting Services.

The newly available SQL Server Business Intelligence edition includes several BI components new to SQL Server 2012 and supports the same CPU core and memory limits as the Standard edition when used for OLTP, but can use the same number of CPU cores as the edition of the Windows OS it is running on when used for BI. New features in the Business Intelligence edition include a new data model for BI, the BI Semantic Model (BISM), and updated PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint, which can now be used with the new Power View self-service reporting feature. The Business Intelligence edition also includes two features, Master Data Services and Data Quality Services, designed to provide a single source of common master data used across an organization and perform data cleansing across data sources, respectively. Reporting Services in the Business Intelligence edition also provides a new feature, Report Alerting, which can send reports automatically when data meet certain criteria.