SQL 2016 Standard or Enterprise

Question

We are planning an on-prem SharePoint 2016 farm and trying to understand what features and benefits there are in using SQL 2016 Enterprise or Standard. I have found little documentation on why one would use one over the other (except price).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and suggestions.

Answer 1

Found this excel document for you which should have the information you're looking for

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/SharePoint-2016-Feature-1746745d

Answer 2

I highly recommend Enterprise for most medium to large customers who require high availability (or easy DR). The reason being is to use AlwaysOn Availability Groups ('Standard' AGs in SQL 2016 Standard will not work for SharePoint) for local site high availability and easy replication to a failover site for Disaster Recovery.

If a customer cannot afford Enterprise licensing, I will still encourage local site high availability via SQL Standard Clustering. For DR in that case, I will use either Log Shipping or ASync database mirroring (db mirroring is considered deprecated now).

Another advantage of SQL Enterprise is database snapshots, although I see them used rarely in the context of SharePoint (e.g. you can use Backup-SPSite with a database snapshot).