What’s in Enterprise only? (Database Tuning Advisor support for recommending Indexed Views)

If you want to leverage the ability provided by SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor to evaluate what would be the benefit of creating indexed views as an additional physical structure, you can select either of the two tuning options available for such purpose: “Indexed views” and “Indexes and indexed views”.

However, those two advanced tuning options are only enabled when the tuning session is executed against an instance of SQL Server which is running Enterprise Edition.

Likewise, if you invoke dta.exe from the command-line and specify either the IDX_IV or IV values for the –fa parameter, and the instance to which it is asked to connect to is not an Enterprise edition, it will fail with error “IDX_IV and IV values of -fa option can be used only when connected to Developer or Enterprise editions of SQL Server.”

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.