SQL: Standard Developer Edition is a Welcome New Addition

If you’ve installed the public preview of SQL Server 2025, you will have noticed that the list of free editions that you can install, has increased.

Instead of just Evaluation, Developer, and Express, the list is now as shown above, with Developer split into Standard Developer and Enterprise Developer.

While the naming of the new editions sound like they are describing the person using them, they are about the included features.

Why did we need this?

Having a way to test Standard Edition features while using the Developer Edition has been requested for a very long time.

In the past, the Developer Edition emulated the paid Enterprise Edition, in terms of the supported features. While that’s great, it meant that you could create applications using it, that wouldn’t work on Standard Edition. And there was no way to limit the features to only those that would work.

I remember mentioning this to a product group member who told me that if that happened, people would just upgrade to Enterprise Edition. That isn’t what would happen at all. The differential in price was large. Instead, there would just be a bunch of upset people.

With this new Standard Developer edition, you can now confidently build and test applications that will be deployed to paid Standard Edition servers.

It’s great to see the product team delivering on this long-term request.

Was it still needed after SQL Server 2016 SP1?

SQL Server 2016 SP1 was a watershed release for SQL Server. Prior to that release, the T-SQL coding surface for Standard Edition (and Express) were very different to Enterprise Edition.

I was one of the main people who had been arguing with the product group management to change this. And I was really pleased with what they did.

What I wanted, was for the coding for all editions to be the same, so you could write an application that would work across all editions. I felt that the Enterprise Edition should just include features that could be added by DBAs and didn’t need to be part of the application code. You shouldn’t need to write different code for each edition.

A good example of enterprise features were the high availability features. Another option for enterprise features were any that improved the performance and scalability, without changing the code.

Overall, I was fairly pleased with the changes that were made. While the need for a Standard feature option for Developer Edition has been reduced since SQL Server 2016 SP1, there still is a need to be able to build and test applications on the same platform that they might be deployed.

2025-06-15