SQL Server Web vs Standard edition

Question

I have found out that there's two versions of SQL Server types that are very different in terms of pricing...

The Web version from my host provider costs about 13$ per 2 core packs, whereas the Standard edition is right around 200$.

From my standpoint, we expect our database to be around 150-200GB in size, only few tables would take up most of that space.

So my only concern is would the web version of SQL Server support this large database and not cause any performance issues to the end users?

How different is index rebuilding on Web and Standard version?

Can someone help me out with this?

Solution

The differences between web and standard version of SQL Server 2016 are listed here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/editions-and-components-of-sql-server-2016

Main differences between web and standard are the max memory and max number of cores. Both web and standard version don't have the possibility of online indexing, this is only possible in the enterprise edition.

For a database size having a size of around 200GB, the web edition looks to be ok. But this depends also on the workload of the database, are just some users querying this database or is this database used by thousand of users.

Comments

[User987]

The database will be off-loaded to another server where it will have a couple of console applications that will need to perform insert of high amount of data into couple of tables ( namely 3 tables )... I'm estimating that about 5000 people will be communicating with database every day... What would you suggest ?

[Brian]

Note that web edition has special licensing requirements. Generally, it is only licensed for public-facing web sites.

[Chris Nevill]

Is the public facing part still the case? I can't find anything about it.

[solublefish]

Do read the docs carefully. Be aware that in addition to the differences called out in this answer, there are others. Of particular importance for a 200GB database may be Backup Compression, which Web edition lacks. It can't be in an Always On failover group. It can't be a replication publisher (source). It can't make encrypted backups. It can't be tuned with Profiler. And more...