Comparison between Enterprise and Standard Versions of SQL 2008 R2

I’ve found myself recently trying to justify the need for Enterprise edition over Standard, with financial contraints being what they are at the moment.

Below is some basic information:-

Enterprise supports database snapshots, indexed views, enhanced read-ahead and scan,  online operations, resource governor, backup compression, hot-add memory and CPU support, fast recovery, online page and file restore, parallel index operations these are not supported in Standard. Security technologies such as Transparent Data Encryption, Advanced third-party key management, Security auditing are limited in Standard edition.

This and more information can be found at:-

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/compare-std-ent.aspx