The significant change with SQL server 2025 editions. Is Microsoft taking a big risk?

💥 SQL Server 2025: Major Changes in Editions! 💥

The arrival of SQL Server 2025 is more than just an update; it's a significant shift in licensing and architecture strategy. Between the removal of a key edition and the relaxation of Standard edition limits, here is why these changes are a major talking point.

📉 The Major Blow: The Removal of the Web Edition

The discontinuation of the Web edition is, in my view, a huge disappointment and a significant problem for many software vendors and SaaS businesses.

• SaaS Impact: This edition was the architectural backbone for many hosting providers and private cloud services, offering an economical, perfectly suited OLTP solution for database micro-segmentation (hundreds per instance).
• Budgetary Constraints: Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of businesses—especially SMEs and startups—will need to revise their budgets. Switching to the Standard edition or, worse, to managed public cloud services (Azure, etc.) is often prohibitively expensive, particularly for High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HADR) needs, which were handled affordably by some hyperscalers (like regional disk replication on Google Cloud).
• Migration Risk: Faced with rising licensing costs, many companies, despite their affinity for the SQL Server ecosystem (.Net, .Net Core), will seriously consider compensating for the technical gap by moving to open-source solutions like PostgreSQL.

My Analysis: While Microsoft cites low usage, the unofficial goal appears twofold: "Azure First" (pushing customers towards more expensive managed services) and a desire to limit the risk of fraud or non-compliance related to the use of this specific license.

🚀 The Good News: The Standard Edition Gets a Boost

Moving on to the positives: the enhancements to the Standard edition are a big win for the ecosystem.

• Increased Hardware Capacity: The Standard edition sees its limits significantly increased, moving from:
• • 24 vCores to 32 vCores.
  • 128 GB of RAM to 256 GB of RAM.
• Performance Gains and Savings: This increase is a strong gesture. For companies already using the Standard edition, this offers significant performance headroom.
• • With effective virtualization, you can optimize licenses by utilizing the physical limit (e.g., 32 physical cores with a 1:1 ratio) and thus double the effective power up to 64 vCores, which can reduce the license cost by over 40% (based on unofficial benchmarks and my client experience).
  • The doubling of RAM is critical, as memory is often the bottleneck (cachestore , less disk spilling, memory-optimized tempdb). Remember: RAM is not included in the licensing cost.
  • Extensive enterprise functionalities: including Resource Governor, which allows administrators to reserve or limit the amount of CPU, memory, and physical I/O resources that can be used by different user workloads on the instance.

Expert Tip: Don't hesitate to opt for high-memory optimized machines and utilize Memory-Optimized Filegroups within your databases, especially for tempdb.

🛠️ Finally, a Standard-Mode Developer Edition!

This is the change I have been asking for for so long: the introduction of the Developer Standard edition!

• Essential Alignment: The classic Developer edition automatically included Enterprise features. The result? Code developed and tested in Dev could rely on Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) algorithms unavailable in the Standard Production environment, leading to performance surprises upon deployment.
• Increased Reliability: Now, development, pre-release, and demo environments can be configured to mimic exactly the limits and functionalities of the Standard Production edition.

🙏 Thank you, Microsoft, for this vital quality-of-life improvement for developers, QA analysts and DBAs!

What is your take on the removal of the Web edition? Is your company impacted? Share your thoughts!