• A rather common view in large enterprises is: "EE everything". They might have considerably better deals on EE Licenses than smaller companies but in the end it's still more expensive than SE Licenses. First thing that ran across my desk was a 4 CPU / 8 GB RAM fresh install with SQL 2014 EE. When I asked why EE "because it's standard", same reply for why 2014. After some thorough research on company Software Lifecycle Policies it was discovered that we could happily use SQL 2017 and on top SE because no EE feature is in use by this particular software.

    Unfortunately this customer is in the cloud so there will be no Optane Goodness to take into account this time, still I hope vNext won't take much longer than SQLPass to be released.