Advantage of Enterprise Edition? (Compared to Std. Edition)

pdj

I have seen the edition comparison from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/f ... tures.mspx) but I have heard a few more NAV related differences. Can anyone please confirm these differences:

* Ability to rebuild indexes and statistics without locking. (Guess this is the "Online Indexing" section)
* Better execution plan due to more intelligent usage of indexed views
* Additional datatypes to reduce the size of a database and even improve performance.

Anything else to consider before selecting edition?

David_Singleton

It makes sense for very large systems, but for smaller systems, I would rather spend that $20,000 extra on Hard Drives, RAM and CPUs.

ara3n

(Enterprise features )
1. Unlimited CPU-s, 4 only for standard
2. Table partitioning
3. Online indexing
4. Online restore
5. Fast recovery
6. SSIS Advanced Transforms
7. Oracle replication
8. Advanced Business Analytics
9. Advanced data mining

David_Singleton

ara3n wrote:

...
1. Unlimited CPU-s, 4 only for standard
...

That is really the border line decider between the two in most NAV implementations.

pdj

I know it is hard to say anything specific, but have you had any clients where 4 quad core cpus were not sufficient? (No. of users, db size, no. of docs/day etc.)
As far as I know does MS consider one cpu for one cpu, no matter if it is a single or dual or quad core, right?

David_Singleton

pdj wrote:

I know it is hard to say anything specific, but have you had any clients where 4 quad core cpus were not sufficient? (No. of users, db size, no. of docs/day etc.)
As far as I know does MS consider one cpu for one cpu, no matter if it is a single or dual or quad core, right?

Someone can confirm this, but I think the change was from SQL 2000-2005, I think it was SQL 2000 where every core counted towards license. But now they count sockets, so 2 Dual core or 2 Quad core CPUs both count as two sockets for license purposes. Think sockets and its a lot easier to work it out.

I have a client with 8 Dual core CPUs, 16 gig of RAM and about 34 Hard drives. Its quite common to see the CPU usage MAX out, and for sure they would like more CPUs and RAM.

Keep in mind also that Eight Dual core CPUs is faster than four quad core CPUs.

The next thing to consider though is the TempDB. Theoretically that client also need 16 RAID 1 arrays just for their one tempdb per CPU. Currently we have just one RAID 1 for the TempDB and it seems OK though.

Nobody

SQL Server Licensing is by CPU socket not core. So 4 single CPU's is the same as 4 quad-core CPU's (8 cores soon) from a licensing standpoint.

kriki

Nobody wrote:

SQL Server Licensing is by CPU socket not core. So 4 single CPU's is the same as 4 quad-core CPU's (8 cores soon) from a licensing standpoint.

Last I read is 6 cores per CPU. Probably 8 cores is in design/development/testing phase.

davmac1

VARDECIMAL is only available in 2005 Enterprise. Data compression is only available in 2008 Enterprise.
Using these feratures reduced an Axapta database by 90% and improved performance.
These changes are defined in DDL, so until Navision supports this, Navision users will see no benefit. Since these changes are transparent to the application, it should be simple for them to support IF they want to do it.