Developer Edition is a free download from Visual Studio Developer Essentials (VSDE).
One licence (from VSDE) is required for each person that accesses or uses the software.
Developer Edition is also available via MSDN.
Developer Edition cannot be used in a production environment. See Developer Edition Restrictions below.
You can use several Developer Edition instances in an AlwaysOn Availability Group (2)
Developer edition provides access to the full capabilities of SQL Server to build and test new mission critical, intelligent applications. Please keep in mind, Developer edition is only for development and test environments and should not be used in production. SQL Server Developer Edition (as of SQL2014) is now a FREE download for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members (free to join).
The license agreement from the SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition states:
From directionsonmicrosoft...
A further useful comment from cloudblogs.microsoft.com...
For customers needing a comprehensive database development solution, we also offer Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions. Visual Studio subscriptions provide additional benefits, including:
Past and current versions of SQL Server (including Enterprise edition)
Past and current versions of Windows and Windows Server for dev/test
A monthly Azure credit of $50 to $150 to use for running dev/test workloads, including Azure SQL Database, SQL Server running in Azure Virtual Machines, and much more
2 or 4 incidents with Microsoft Technical Support*
Visual Studio Professional or Visual Studio Enterprise, for state-of-the-art database development
Source code management/version control, work item management, builds, and more using Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services
And much more…
Key deciding factors for use of Enterprise Edition include....
Does the database need Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).. e.g. for PCI compliance? Note that from SQL2019 TDE is also available in Sandard Edition.
Is the environment virtualised? EE allows "unlimited virtualisation". Other editions require 4 core licenses per VM. EE requires 1 core license per physical core in the virtualised environment but allows an unlimited number of virtual machines to be deployed on those cores.
Do you need the performance benefits?
Do you need online index rebuilds? (i.e. if the database needs to be available 24/7 you could assume that at some point you will need to rebuild an index... can you live with that index being offline for the duration?).
IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb.dbo.##enterprise_features') IS NOT NULL
DROP TABLE ##enterprise_features
CREATE TABLE ##enterprise_features
(
dbname SYSNAME,
feature_name VARCHAR(100),
feature_id INT
)
EXEC sp_msforeachdb
N' USE [?]
IF (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features) >0
BEGIN
INSERT INTO ##enterprise_features
SELECT dbname=DB_NAME(),feature_name,feature_id
FROM sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features
END '
SELECT *
FROM ##enterprise_features
Express Edition is limited to the lesser of 1 socket or 4 cores. In a virtual environment this, by default, equates to 1 thread of 1 core (since all vcpus are considered 1 processor). In VMWare there is a way to present multicore vcpus, but this is not the default. Be very careful about accidentally breaching the license agreement.
Express Edition does not have an SQL Agent.
Express Edition has a 10GB maximum database size, but you can have multiple 10GB databases (4GB with SQL2008).
Express Edition can utilize a maximum of 1GB of memory.
Maximum memory for buffer pool per instance is 1410MB
Maximum memory for Columnstore segment cache per instance is 352MB
Maximum memory-optimised data size per database is 352MB
You can run multiple instances of Express Edition on a single server/virtual machine
LocalDB is a lightweight version of SQL Server Express, aimed mainly at developers.
Standard Edition is limited to the lesser of 4 sockets or 16 cores
Standard Edition is limited to the lesser of 4 sockets or 24 cores
This is the Microsoft equivalent of SQLite - it is free to distribute and use.
In February 2013, Microsoft announced that SQL Server Compact Edition had been deprecated.Although no new versions or updates are planned, Microsoft will continue to support SQL Compact through their standard lifecycle support policy. This support ended in July 2021. (1)This is an 180 day evaluation of Enterprise Edition. After 180 days the instance will stop and will not be restartable without converting to another edition.
The Microsoft SQL Server release is NOT supported by Microsoft Customer Services and Support (CSS). (3)
The Microsoft SQL Server release is available for testing purposes only and should NOT be installed and used in production environments. (3)