Category: Versions

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.

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A quick roundup on some big news from Microsoft Ignite.

John Deardurff hits the marketing materials:

The wait is over! SQL Server 2025 is officially here, and it’s more than just another version. I’ve been working with it during the last six months it was in public preview, and some of the features announced still surprised me. Let’s break down what makes this release so exciting and why it’s a game-changer for businesses and developers alike.

Andy Yun is pleased that Standard Edition just got a lot more powerful:

While all of the new features and such were available during Public Preview, one thing that was not public until now is that Standard Edition limits have been increased! Yay! The CPU core count limit is now 32 cores (or 4 sockets, whichever is lesser) and the max buffer pool memory per instance is now 256GB! Additionally, Resource Governor is now available for Standard Edition. And in SQL Server 2025, Resource Governor can also help you manage TempDB!

Reitse Eskens goes into several useful features, including Express Edition love:

You may have seen earlier blogs from me on SQL Server 2025; I won’t repeat that content in full, but I’ll provide a brief summary. You can find the full blogs here.

Something I wasn’t able to mention before, but you can now find in the documentation, is that SQL Server Express has upgraded its game! No longer a limit of 10 GB for the database, but 50 GB. This makes it much more useful in many scenarios.

Brent Ozar lays out a bunch of features as well:

If you use columnstore indexes, 2025 continues upon every release’s investments, with a bunch of improvements to make management easier on ordered indexes. In my early tests with clients, we’ve seen massive improvements in easier, faster, more online maintenance that we simply couldn’t do before.

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