What’s in Enterprise only? (Backup Mirroring)

Increasing the reliability of your backups by providing redundancy is something you can achieve with SQL Server’s mirrored backups, which is an out-of-the-box feature available only 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.)

If you attempt to run a backup command which includes the MIRROR clause, against a non-Enterprise SKU instance of SQL Server, you will get back error 3218 “Backup mirroring is not available in this edition of SQL Server. See Books Online for more details on feature support in different SQL Server editions.”

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.