SQL Server 2008 Enterprise feature coming to SQL Server Standard 2008 R2 – Backup Compression

Roman Rehak - Backup compression no longer Enterprise edition only

“Last week at PASS I had a discussion with a program manager on the SQL Server team and he told me that in SQL Server 2008 R2, backup compression will be available in the Standard edition. I suspect this announcement will leave many of you very happy. It is certainly good news for my company since we have quite a few auxiliary servers with large databases, but not critical enough to justify enterprise licenses.

For more details about feature breakdown in R2, look here - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2-editions.aspx.

…”

Nice. I’ve been trying to build the case for SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, with compression being one of my selling points. While this move is only backup compression and not data compression, still it’s nice to see Enterprise features move down the stack. Now if I could get transparent encryption and data compression I’d be a happy camper (and would finally shut up about Enterprise… ;)

Maybe by the time we get everything in place for our SQL Server 2008 Migration maybe R2 will be out and we can move directly to it.