From: Ellen K. 

The other thing to bear in mind is that you may not need Enterprise.
Enterprise is currently needed if you want to use the prebuilt log shipping
or clustering, or more than 2 CPUs or more than 4 GB RAM.  I think you also
need Enterprise for indexed views (what Oracle calls materialized views). 
If you want log shipping on Standard you can RYO. I'm using Standard on all
my current databases, and it's about 1/4 the cost.

For 2005 they are coming out with another level I forget the name of that's
between Standard and Enterprise but is only slightly more expensive than
the current Standard (I think list is $6K vs $5K for the current Standard),
it has failover clustering, up to I think 4 CPUs, and as much RAM as your
O/S allows.

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:36:42 -0400, "Robert Comer"
 wrote in message
:

>So it wouldn't make sense here...
>
>- Bob Comer
>
>
>
>"John Cuccia"  wrote in message
>news:nr23b1l8rm1mrth1jm9tvj5mc6tvu34tpv{at}4ax.com...
>> On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:22:38 -0400, "Robert Comer"
>>  wrote:
>>
>>>> As for per-user, I can't imagine going per-user on a production
>>>> database, per-CPU gets cheaper at a pretty low number of users.
>>>
>>>Just what is that pretty low number of users?
>>
>> Looks like just under 100, based on this:
>> http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.asp
>>
>> Enterprise is $19128 per processor.
>>
>> Per server + user CAL price is $6382 + $146/user, so
>>
>> (19128 - 6382)/146 = 87
>>
>

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