Should we use standard license for UAT environment for MS SQL 2019?

Question

Project is using enterprise license for MS SQL 2019 for production environment.

For UAT/testing environment, should we use standard or developer license?

Understand that developer license has the same features as enterprise but some suggested to use standard license as it is closer to production environment

Need advise on this.

Answer 1

Hi Keith,

No license is required for the Developer Edition, only the Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition require the purchase of a license. For detailed information about the license issue, you can call 1-800-426-9400, Monday through Friday, 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. (Pacific Time) to speak directly to a Microsoft licensing specialist. Or you can go to Volume Licensing Service Center support. Please choose region/language and choose to call or have web.

Please refer to this document about differences between the different editions: Editions and supported features of SQL Server 2019

Best regards,

Seeya

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Answer 2

From a technical perspective, it is certainly better to have Standard Edition, but Developer is cheaper. :--)

If you go with Developer, I would suggest that you run this configuration changes:

ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION SET BATCH_MODE_ON_ROWSTORE = OFF
ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION SET ROW_MODE_MEMORY_GRANT_FEEDBACK = OFF
ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION SET BATCH_MODE_MEMORY_GRANT_FEEDBACK = OFF
ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION SET BATCH_MODE_ADAPTIVE_JOINS = OFF

This will turn off some of the performance features that are not available in Standard Edition. This reduces the risk that you find that things run slower in production than in test.