Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Enterprise

SQL Server 2019 Enterprise: database server for large and business-critical applications

Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Enterprise is the edition of SQL Server 2019 for mission-critical workloads in the data centre. An instance uses as many processor cores and as much memory for the buffer pool as the operating system supports; a relational database can grow to up to 524 petabytes. This makes the edition suitable for extensive ERP and retail systems, databases with many concurrent connections, data warehouse applications and environments in which a database is to remain available even during maintenance work or if a server fails.

High availability and maintenance during operation

Always On availability groups keep several databases up to date together on up to eight secondary replicas, up to five of them synchronously. Read/write connections are automatically redirected to the primary replica, and availability groups are also possible without a cluster. Failover cluster instances support up to 16 nodes, in addition to log shipping, database mirroring and mirrored backups.

Many maintenance tasks are possible without interruption: indexes can be created and rebuilt online, a rebuild can be paused and resumed later, schema changes are carried out online, and individual pages or files are restored during operation. Memory and processors can be added during operation. Also included are Accelerated Database Recovery as well as compressed and encrypted backups.

Performance and analysis

Intelligent query processing is fully included in Enterprise, including batch mode on rowstore, adaptive joins, memory grant feedback in batch and row mode, and automatic tuning. With Resource Governor, processor, memory and I/O resources can be divided between applications, for example between reporting queries and transaction processing. In addition, there are In-Memory OLTP, columnstore indexes, table and index partitioning, data compression and support for persistent memory; the columnstore segment cache and memory-optimised data are not restricted by an edition limit in Enterprise.

For data warehouse scenarios, Enterprise offers star join query optimisation, parallel processing of partitioned tables and change data capture. Peer-to-peer transactional replication distributes changes between several equal servers, and Oracle publishing integrates Oracle databases into replication. The integration of R and Python via Machine Learning Services uses all available cores in Enterprise and is not limited to data volumes held in memory.

The protection of confidential data includes Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for database files at rest, Always Encrypted with secure enclaves, Extensible Key Management for external key management, row-level security, dynamic data masking and server and database auditing.

Licensing model

SQL Server Enterprise is licensed per core. All physical cores of the server are licensed, with a minimum of four core licences per physical processor; core licences are sold in packs of two cores. Client access licences (CALs) for users or devices are not required in this model, and the number of users and devices accessing the server is unlimited.

Buy SQL Server 2019 Enterprise: licence and scope of delivery

You receive a product key for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Enterprise. You select the number of core licences when ordering in the product variant. SQL Server 2019 is installed exclusively on x64 systems. The scope of delivery includes:

• the product key for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Enterprise
• the download link for the installation file (all downloads are also available under Software Download)
• instructions for installation and activation (see also Guides and FAQ)
• the invoice by email

Once your payment has been received, your product key is displayed directly on the order confirmation page and also sent to you by email. After that, you can retrieve it again at any time: with a customer account under My Product Codes, without a customer account via the Guest Portal.

If you have any questions about installation or activation, our Support team is available around the clock by email. For several servers and larger environments, offers for businesses, schools and public authorities are available in the B2B Area. You will find further server products in the category Windows Server and under Operating Systems.

System requirements

Minimum requirements according to Microsoft. The Enterprise edition is only supported on Windows Server, not on Windows 10 or Windows 11. You should increase the memory as the database grows. Installation fails on a Windows system with case sensitivity enabled in the file system.