bit Obscene: SQL Server 2025 Standard Edition
Video Summary
In this video, I delve into the latest updates for SQL Server 2025 Standard Edition, discussing its key features and limitations alongside my co-host Sean. We explore how the increased memory and CPU limits can benefit many users without the need to jump to Enterprise Edition, while also highlighting some areas where Standard Edition remains somewhat restricted, particularly in columnstore indexing and certain performance optimizations. We touch on practical considerations for those considering a migration from older versions or Enterprise Editions, as well as the potential benefits of moving to managed instances or Azure SQL Database. The discussion covers a range of topics, including High Availability Group (AG) basics and the challenges they present compared to more advanced features available in Enterprise Edition. Throughout the video, we aim to provide insights that can help database administrators and IT professionals make informed decisions about their SQL Server environments.
Full Transcript
Erikodynamovsky, L- Welcome back to our presumably second 15 minute episode of the Bit Obscene radio program. We’ll be talking about standard edition for SQL Server 2025, this go around. I do want to make a quick announcement here that this beautiful Darling Data T-shirt, I wore this during one of the days of the pre-con that Kendra Little and I did at Past Data Community Summit. in 2025, or well, I guess a few weeks ago now, and I will be auctioning this off. The proceeds of all of the auctioning will go to the Darling Data Home for Little Wanderers. So we do hope that this shirt will sell for quite a bit of money. It’s still… Did you wash it? No, it’s unwashed. It still smells like pre-con smear. Fresh Erik smell. Yeah, so you got a whole day of me in a shirt, on a shirt. So, hopefully, that will increase the price. Anyway, welcome back. We’re going to kick this off by… Let’s start with Sean this time, because Sean was…
Oh, baby. Sean was blissfully quiet during the IQP talk. So we’re gonna pick on Sean and make him talk about standard edition of SQL Server 2025 here. Sean, take it away. What is your opening salvo? Sean, take it away. I think there’s two things to talk about here, and I think they’re both good, right? You got the standard developer edition. Correct. Which technically meets standard edition requirements of this talk. And two is the increased limits for memory and CPU. I don’t see either of these as a negative in any way, other than more people complaining that it doesn’t have the features of Enterprise Edition.
But, you know, I mean, you opted to up the memory, 256 gig, which… Still pretty good, especially if you look at cloud offerings. Yep. Go see our talk on cloud. And, you know, given how much RAM costs now, right?
Oh, yeah, with the recent… No, it’s crazy. I bought RAM for 200 bucks a year ago, and now it’s like 700. Yeah. Wow.
What should I auction my laptop off? I have 128 gigs in my laptop. I feel like I should auction it with a micron. The brick of gold. Yeah, right? Yeah. Nice. If any of it’s micron, you might be able to get sentimental stuff now since they’re exiting the market.
I don’t actually know what’s in there. I don’t know. I could… If I thought either of my kids were destined for college, this would be their college fund. I was gonna say at this point.
Yeah. I mean, I have points in a liquor store. But, aside from that, I don’t know. Some of them are… The lesser of four sockets. Some of them are e-cores, so we don’t really count those.
Good. The lesser of four sockets are 32 P-cores. I agree with Sean. Everything is the lesser of four sockets. I agree with Sean. It seems like Microsoft did a good thing for once, and it’s hard to even complain about it.
I’m speechless. Joe agreed with me. Is that allowed in his contract? Fully agreed.
Well, the reason I don’t agree is because normally you say things that are wrong, but now you said something that was right. So I agree with you. It’s simple. One thing you mentioned is the resource governor edition on Staron, which could be huge for certain workloads. Memory grants specifically.
Yeah, using Comstore. It’s really easy to get these ridiculous 25% memory grants, which you might not want. I’m a big believer in resource governor for Comstore. I don’t know how you use it without it, but apparently.
Just not for CPU. No. Yes. Yes. Not for CPU. That’s correct. For memory and for maybe tracking parts of the workload to do reporting on it, but not CPU or CPU limiting or that stuff.
Yeah. People touch CPU and to go from an earlier joke, you know, if you just configure it correctly, all these problems go away. So.
So if you just configure it correctly, our friend Forrest has a good blog post about resource governor and CPU, which I would. I would argue people should read before ever touching it. There should be like a gooey checkbox in management studio where you go to check the box and you have to take like maybe a 10 question quiz.
Yeah. On it. Got to go read force blog posts and then take quiz. There are a lot of options that should require some quizzing before changing.
Like you should have to like, like maybe, maybe like a sobriety test. Like you should have to like. Well, I’m crazy.
Yeah. I never use management studio again. That’s bad. ADS is going away. That’s true. You’ll never, never catch me in there. But no, I think, I think Microsoft finally sort of like caught up with stuff. You know, for years I looked at developer edition is like a gateway drug to enterprise edition because people would make all their stuff on it and then roll out standard edition and be like, ha ha, we’ve gotten away with it.
And then standard edition just had so many crappy things about it that, you know, they need to run to enterprise edition pretty quickly. But I mean, 2016 added a lot of the items into standard edition. Well, yeah.
I think those were good things. They know that they were good things. And I’m not, I’m not arguing with that. But from my perspective, where standard edition is still woefully hobbled is around columnstore where everything is limited to adopt of two. Yeah.
And like, you know, granted you like there are some situations where, you know, batch mode adopt two is still better than row mode adopt eight. But that like those are those are even those are a little bit tricky at times. So I like, you know, if they like I think that, you know, the next thing would really have to be opening up some of the perf stuff to be cross edition, because some of it is and it gets confusing to figure out like, like scalar UDF inlining is enterprise and standard.
And it’s like there’s like there’s some stuff where it’s just like, no, it’s a net positive for society. We should do this. And then there’s other things are like, no, that’s enterprise only.
And I just feel like hobbling batch mode on standard edition is one of those like, like, like mean, like robber baron. It’s just like your family starves this Christmas. You didn’t pitch enough coal for me.
It’s like, ah, crap. Like, so that that that to me, like, you know, there’s still stuff about standard edition where I’m like, nah, like, don’t you can’t use that. But I do think Microsoft did did some good deeds with it for 2025. And I’m going to try not to gripe too much.
Eric wants something to complain about. So well done. Yeah. Like the batch mode and Magstop 2 thing. I forgot about that. Like, you know, they’re going to finally have like a brand new paradigm for parallel processing. It’s going to be super good.
It’s going to scale super high. It’s going to solve so many of the problems with Roma parallelism, you know, skewed rows and the in the repartition. With my own customization streams, very busy schedulers.
With the remote query, but you can only ride a Magstop 2. It’s like giving you the smallest possible taste of a drug. That’s how you get people, right?
The first one’s free. Small taste. Just start. I mean, I guess so. Yeah, that is an interesting limitation. Well, that’s not true.
I mean, standard edition a little bit in Pride, but I wouldn’t call myself a standard edition. I mean, standard edition is great for a lot of people, though. It’s just so express.
Well, that’s what I’m saying. Like, 2025 made Express even better. I agree. Agreed. But standard edition solves a really, again, a really unique area where Express isn’t quite enough. But Enterprise is obviously ridiculous in terms of getting a license and running it.
I think standard really does fit that role very well, especially with some of the security items that came through in the previous versions and stuff like that. But honestly, there’s a lot of things that people could run with standard edition that they don’t. And, you know, they use Enterprise.
And conversely, I think there’s a lot of things that people run on Express edition. And it’s like, I want to smack you. Stop. Just go to standard. Like, ah.
You know, especially now that standard edition can use, what is it, 32 cores? Yeah. Like, come on, man. Give me some better DOP options on batch mode. I want.
Well, if you think about the hardware, too, outside of, I know everyone’s getting super hot and heavy over ARM, which I’m going to argue is not the correct microprocessor architecture to run database stuff on. Even, you know, the ARM 64 EC stuff and whatever. But I’m sure I’ll get roasted for that.
It’s fine. I don’t really care because it’s, you know, you’re wrong anyway. But the amount of CPUs, at least for, like you were saying previously, you know, you had your laptop had some E cores in it. The amount of CPUs that are x86, 64, and our full execution units hasn’t really gone up super high.
Right? Especially not ones where if you want to take, you know, you’re talking about columnstore, if you really want to take advantage of a lot of that stuff, and even a lot of the new features where you’re getting crazy efficiencies from. I mean, you want those SIMD instructions, right?
You want AVX. You want all that stuff. You’re not going to get that on these crappy ARM and these crappy other CPUs or E cores or whatever. So, I mean, 32 cores, I think, is a really good spot, even by today’s standards, for actual decent execution of stuff with having full processor capability and what that entails.
Sean, I’m curious. Do you think some standard edition customers end up kind of being blocked from doing a migration to, like, managed instances or Azure SQL database just because they’re getting so much savings and licensing costs that going into a cloud platform that eliminates the difference between standard and enterprise just doesn’t make sense for them? No, because typically those people are going to go to that anyway because their CIO told them that we need to be cloud first.
Well, but in the maybe rare case where the CIO wants to report of, well, we’re paying X today, we’d be paying Y on the cloud. You know, if you’re standard, that’s always going to look better for you in terms of comparison, unless you’re doing, like, Azure VMs or something and you still stay in standard. Yeah, I wouldn’t say it would.
My personal opinion, I don’t think it’s a blocker because you’re already running standard locally unless you’re really, you’re going to be blocked from migrating for some other reason, right? Like, you can’t put your data there or whatever. And if you are going to migrate, it’s going to be outside of, you know, idiot telling someone that we have to be there.
You’re going to do it for other reasons, such as like, you know, we want more controller or longer backups. We don’t have the infrastructure for it or we really don’t need 64 cores, right? Or 32 cores.
We really only need four and we actually may save money by doing it because we only need a four core thing on MI or hyperscale or something. So I don’t think it’s really blocking anyone from doing it. I think that’s obviously nice that you get the enhancements, but I don’t think many of those people are doing it for the enhancements.
Like, I don’t think it’s the standard having new stuff is really going to block any of that. If you were going to do it, you’re going to do it first. If you have a legitimate reason, you were going to do it anyway.
If you don’t have a legitimate reason, you were going to do it anyway. So let’s suppose you’re on 2008 R2, which we all know is the best version of SQL Server. You’re on Enterprise and you don’t have SA.
Well, I suppose that’d be obvious if you’re on 2008 R2. What are the big things to look out for if you’re considering switching from Enterprise to Standard other than the Comstar, which of course you’re not using because you’re on 2008 R2? Yeah, going from an earlier version like that, a lot of things to consider that you are actually going to be upscaled.
So what was in 2008 R2 Enterprise is just going to be in Standard Edition today, which is great. I mean, that’s awesome, right? You’re actually people need to upgrade, you know, get off of Windows XP and, you know, anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff.
I think the things actually to watch watch out for are going to be some of the stuff we talked previously around, like IQP and things of that nature, where your workload’s not going to run the same. I mean, you’re just not, you’re going to get stuff that was slow is going to be fast, stuff that was fast is going to be slow, and stuff that was slow is going to stay slow. It’s going to be a mixed bag.
Like there’s, that’s really the biggest thing. Good. We’re talking about a more modern version of SQL Server, right? Like from 2019 or so, because the IQP stuff is pretty recent. So if like, yeah, but think about it, don’t have SA, it’s free to upgrade.
Is that how that works? Yeah. If you have SA, it’s free to upgrade. If you don’t, you don’t. So I don’t know if there’s been enough time where like, if you don’t have SA, you’d be looking for an upgrade. But look how many places are running in 2016, which is end of life, right?
I mean, there’s so many places around 2016 where a lot of those, I know you prefer not to. That’s the, you don’t want to look at those skeletons. We definitely didn’t retire a SQL Server 2016 instance last week.
That definitely didn’t happen. That’s not something that happened. I’m just going to say that for the record. What do you think about the basic AGs?
So let’s say I’m a very cost conscious customer. I’m going to use standard. Like what, what’s the starting point for HADR? Yeah.
The starting point is definitely. So technically database mirroring is still in there, right? You can still technically use it, but I will slap anyone who does. Like I will find you and I will slap you. Some people are into that.
I, well, it might be slap as a service for. Then you’ll get an invoice for it. Yeah. But the it’s, that’s actually a really great question, Joe, because it’s, it does offer the basics.
Like I’m not, I’m personally not a fan of basic AGs. Just in general, you get, you know, to what you were saying before you get just enough where it’s sort of helpful, but not really because of how it’s implemented. Like you get that taste and yes, that’s, that could be an impetus to upgrade.
But if you need that level, you should have been an enterprise anyway. I guess that’s just an argument there, but for the basic AGs, I do. I love them in terms of you actually get decent functionality for it.
I just hate that you can’t, there’s no upgrade path. And what I mean by that is you put in the basic AG. Yeah.
You can’t do your readable secondary. You can’t do a bunch of stuff for the reason why you would actually use it. Uh, but if you’re saying just for HADR, you kind of get the HADR, right? You kind of get it.
It’s not a hundred percent, but you, you get 50% of the way there and, and you can play with it and say, okay, this may actually work for the, so for this one rope, you know, maybe critical system or something, that’s where we go. We don’t upgrade any of the other licenses.
Sure. But I don’t like that there is no upgrade path. So what I mean by that is let’s say you create a basic availability group and you say, this is, this is awesome.
We love it. We want to go to enterprise. We tried developer edition, you know, as a, as an example for enterprise and it worked really well based on what we’ve done. This and that.
Not now, what do you do now? You take a replica out upgraded to enterprise and do what? Yeah, exactly.
As someone who is very ill-informed about this, I did ask a question on Stack Exchange four years ago and I think you were still boycoring at the time because you didn’t answer personally. So you really let me down there.
So the question I asked was basically, I’m reading about basic availability groups. You can’t do integrity checks on the secondary. This seems really bad.
Like, is this even tenable? And the answers were generally, well, if you’re willing to like fail over often so you can integrity check your secondary, then sure. That’s what everyone wants to do.
Yeah. Fail over into an integrity check. Yeah, that’s definitely what everyone wants to do. But speaking of a taste, I’ve heard rumors that we’re going to have a video dedicated to how 2025 changes pages.
Have you heard that rumor, Eric? I have. I have. I’ve actually heard that rumor about someone on this radio program producing that video. Yeah.
That person should really get it done. Yeah. That person should get it done. Anyway, I have two thoughts on this, and we can close out whenever. One is it two.
I was giving you the perfect way to close out, man. Let it go. 2008 R2 is not the best version of SQL Server. 2008 is the best version of SQL Server. Because that was before Microsoft changed their licensing model.
So I have a client on SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition, because they have a lot of memory, and they do not pay per core. So they’re balling out there.
And the other thing is that I do not understand why anyone would go the route of a basic availability group when a failover cluster in log shipping still exists in the world. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. You’re on Standard Edition. Don’t bag it. Failover cluster in log shipping. Yeah. Failover cluster in log shipping. Sounds like you’re trying to answer it to my question. I heard a rumor that log shipping was updated in 2020.
I can mark it. Really? Accept it. Wait. Wait. Wait. Hold on. Stop the presses. What got updated in log shipping for 2025? It’s breaks when you upgrade, right?
Aside from that. Oh. Wait. It’s called a feature, Joe. Wait. Did you want more than that? Yeah. I wanted more ammo for my log shipping love. It supports TDS-8.
Oh. Well, that doesn’t do anything for me. I’m sorry. You’re more secure, Eric.
I was already secure. I was already quite secure. All right. Well, I think that’s enough about Standard Edition. Thank you all for watching. I don’t know what we’re going to talk about in the next video yet.
It is undecided, but from the look on Joe’s face, it will be something very serious. So whatever we decide to talk about, you will listen to and enjoy. Anyway, thank you.
Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you.
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