Understand the editions of SQL Server - SQL Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] When you're ready to get started with SQL Server, you have a number of different installation options and additions to choose from. First, let's talk about the platform that you want to install on. SQL Server can be installed directly on Linux computers in addition to PCs running the Windows operating system. Unfortunately, there is no version available on Mac OS though, so if you're on a Mac, you'll have to use one of these other options. For instance, you can install SQL Server with a cloud-hosted provider such as Microsoft's Azure platform. The advantage to this is that your databases will be accessible from anywhere in the world, and hardware configurations can be changed on the fly to increase or decrease capacity as needed. Or you can use a containerized approach using a system such as Docker. This creates an isolated container that SQL Server runs inside of, which makes it simple to deploy onto a wide variety of computers in a controlled, repeatable manner. So there's lots of different options for how you actually run SQL Server. Regardless of your platform though, the underlying server software is exactly the same and the same T-SQL commands will still apply. SQL Server comes in a number of different additions in order to meet the needs of a wide variety of use cases. Enterprise Edition is the most fully-featured and will allow you to utilize all of the CPU cores and memory that you choose to install. Standard Edition places limits on the resources that it can take advantage of. There's a limit of 24 CPU cores and 128 gigabytes of system memory that's applied per instance. Both of these two additions require paid licenses to deploy. Microsoft does provide two free solutions though, which are perfect for our needs in learning how the system works. Express Edition has a few advanced features removed and is limited to 16 processor cores and 64 gigabytes of system memory. However, even with these limitations, it's still a very powerful RDBMS platform and would be suitable for many small businesses. You're not going to run the next great online shopping superstore or the hottest multiplayer game with Express Edition, but for tracking inventory and customer orders for a small brand, it could be perfect and you can't beat the price. Microsoft allows you to use it completely free even for commercial activities. The other free edition is called Developer. Developer Edition has all of the same features as Enterprise Edition, but it can only be used to develop applications or for testing. You can also use Developer Edition for non-commercial educational purposes. Therefore, if you plan on using your database for real world data collection and review, your best choice is probably going to be Express Edition. If you'll be exclusively working with example data sets for learning how the software works, then feel free to download and install Developer Edition. Finally, there's one additional edition that you may see depending on the timing of when you're looking at SQL Server 2022. During the public preview period of any new version, Microsoft makes an Evaluation Edition available. This is so that people can get hands-on experience with the newest version before its official release. So that handles the installation of the server. But what about the user interface? By itself, SQL Server offers a command line interface that takes text input and passes it directly to the server to process. However, a command line interface is not the most user-friendly way to work with your databases, so you may choose to install a graphical application instead. Microsoft provides an additional program called Management Studio that most database professionals use in order to get a graphical user interface similar to Windows Explorer. It's a separate add-on program that isn't required, but we'll install it here in this course to help us get used to the server's operation and ease us into writing our own T-SQL commands in a more beginner-friendly environment. The problem is, is that Management Studio is a Windows-only application. If you want to access SQL Server from a computer running Linux or Mac OS, you'll want to take a look at a different graphical interface application called Azure Data Studio. It provides similar functionality to SSMS, but is cross-platform, so you can run it on any computer. Take a look at my course called "Azure Data Studio Essential Training" for information on using this tool if you're working on a Mac or Linux computer. So that gives us our next steps. We now need to install two pieces of software to get up and running. First, we need the SQL Server instance itself. Standard Edition will work well, or you can choose the Developer, or Evaluation Edition as other free alternatives. Then we need a graphical interface, and for that, I'm going to be using SQL Server Management Studio.