• I've worked at smaller shops where we're clearly not an "Enterprise" size of company and Standard edition would work great for our needs. But you see it especially with 2008 that a lot of the really neat features that'd be fun to learn and experiment with are only in the Enterprise edition. Of course I'd be in favour of having all the features in all the editions (except Express), but even if they just put a bit more thought into which features go into which edition, I'd be happier. Like in your example with TDE, is encryption something that would only be of value to a large enterprise? Or would everyone benefit? Sounds like something that should be "standard" with SQL Server, or even put it all the way back into Express where students learning will get used to encrypting their databases. Resource governor? I'd argue that smaller shops would see much more benefit from it than an enterprise who uses virtual servers to better distribute the load, so standard edition would be a good fit.