Brendan McCaffrey cuts some cores:
Minimizing CPU core counts is a perfect example of how to add value, and is arguably one of the easiest ways to do so.
I run this exercise in my environments about every six months, typically right before true-up time and again at mid-year, just to make sure we haven’t drifted too far.
Read on to see what Brendan does.
This next bit is weird for me to write because I’ve always been an Enterprise Edition snob. But another tip that I have is to take a very serious look at Standard Edition. If you’re using SQL Server 2025, you can have up to 32 cores and 256 GB of RAM in your buffer pool. Taking a look at the available features, losing online index (re)builds and superior availability groups sucks, but it’s not the end of the world for most shops. If you have large enough databases to really benefit from online index rebuilds, read-ahead scans, merry-go-round scans, batch mode on rowstore, and the like—generally, data warehouses or large OLTP instances with heavy read workloads—then those could benefit from Enterprise. But the cost in terms of lost functionality has decreased considerably in the past decade.