What’s in Enterprise only? (Resource Governor)

You may have faced situations where you’d have wished you could avoid a run-away query consuming most or all CPU or memory shared resources of the server resources, or avoid the execution of unpredictable workload, or simply prioritize workloads so that resources are granted in a way that one workload is allowed to proceed faster than another or is guaranteed to complete if there is resource contention.

In order to address all of these scenarios, SQL Server 2008 was the first release introducing a new functionality known as Resource Governor. This feature that allows you to manage SQL Server workload and resources by specifying limits on resource consumption by incoming requests is only available in the Enterprise Edition (or a Developer Edition or an Evaluation Edition, both of which behave exactly like the Enterprise does. The only difference among them three is their licensing.)

This post is part of the a series I decided to call “Understanding the value of the Enterprise Edition, one feature at a time” which I started in September 2011 and will grow on a weekly basis, having a new post incorporated to the family every Friday.