- [Instructor] SQL Server 2017 is the newest version of the database platform from Microsoft. You can find out more information about the capabilities and features by visiting this website here. If we scroll down a little bit, we can see some of the product features highlighted in this section. This includes the fact that we can run it on Linux and Windows PCs and that it includes industry-leading performance and so on. Scrolling down a little bit further will bring us to a section on documentation. Here we can download a datasheet, view some white papers, and even view some videos on demand on some of the new features.
Now SQL Server 2017 comes in a variety of editions that are tailored to the needs and capabilities required by the database administrator and the systems that they intend to support. You can review the options available by going up to the top and clicking on the link for editions. Then when I scroll down, we'll find that we have the four available SQL Server 2017 editions of Enterprise, Standard, Express, and Developer. There are two editions that are free to use with slightly different requirements. The Developer edition is used for experimentation, testing, and development of applications, but it's not licensed for any live production use.
The Developer edition includes the full capabilities of Enterprise available for testing. The other free option is SQL Server Express which is a lightweight edition that's licensed for use on small production databases. However, it doesn't include some of the more powerful features available at Enterprise or Standard. For more details on the capabilities of each version, just scroll down a little bit and you can see this comparison chart. In the SQL Server 2017 Express column which is the third column, we can scroll down and see that we can have a maximum database size of 10 gigabytes whereas the other editions allow up to 524 petabytes.
Scrolling back up to the top, we can see some other limitations. SQL Server 2017 Express will only allow you to use four processor cores and tops out at about a gigabyte of system memory. The advantage to using the Express edition is that Microsoft actually licenses its use for production environments as well. You can go ahead and scroll back down to the bottom of the chart and we'll see this section here called production use rights. This bullet indicates that Microsoft will allow its use in production databases. However, we can see that there's no bullet here for the Developer edition. So if you're developing a small system that'll work within these restrictions, then the Express edition might be a perfect fit.
For this course, I'm going to work with the Developer edition since it's free for educational purposes. It'll contain all of the features of Enterprise, but we can't use it for a production database so just keep that in mind. If you already have access to an installation of SQL Server, then feel free to use whatever is already installed. For everyone else though that wants their own copy, go ahead and scroll all the way back up to the top and then click on the try now button. Then underneath the Developer edition link, go ahead and click the download now button.
That'll place a small installation file into our downloads folder and we'll use it to install the software in the next movie.
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