What’s in Enterprise only? (Soft-Numa configuration)

Much has been written about SQL Server’s support for Soft Numa since even before the first release which supported that concept (SQL Server 2005) was released.

Among the list of interesting posts about it, I propose you to read these:

• A new platform layer in SQL Server 2005 to exploit new hardware capabilities and their trends
• Configuring SQL Server 2005 for Soft NUMA
• How to set Soft-NUMA for SQL Server 2008 R2
• How It Works: Soft NUMA, I/O Completion Thread, Lazy Writer Workers and Memory Nodes
• How to: Configure SQL Server to Use Soft-NUMA

Although, interesting is the fact that all of them lack a critical piece of information. That being that you can only leverage Soft-Numa as long as the instance is an 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.)

Then, don’t try to set the Registry keys to configure Soft-Numa for a Standard Edition instance. It won’t complain or warn you about anything, but SQL Server will just skip running the part of the code that would read those Registry settings and would accordingly affect the way the NUMA nodes are configured.

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.