Microsoft has redesigned the SQL Server 2005 product family to better meet the needs of specific customer segments by introducing four new editions: Express, Workgroup, Standard, and Enterprise.

These new editions offer a range of features—from high availability and scalability to advanced business intelligence tools—designed to empower users across an organization. As a low-cost mainstream database, SQL Server 2005 delivers unprecedented value and functionality compared with competitive solutions. For demanding enterprise systems, SQL Server 2005 represents a dramatic step forward, with reduced application downtime, and high scalability and performance, and tight security-related controls.

SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition scales to the performance levels required to support enterprise online transaction processing (OLTP), highly complex data analysis, data warehousing systems, and Web sites. With comprehensive business intelligence, robust analytics capabilities and high-availability features such as failover clustering and database mirroring, SQL Server Enterprise can handle the most critical enterprise workloads.