This article is part of a series of posts on the forthcoming SQL Server 2025 release. Once 2025 has been released, posts will be kept if the feature hasn't changed for the final release. For other posts in this series, you can find them in this collection.

SQL Server Developer Edition has for years provided a free data platform to test and develop applications in an environment that has all SQL Server features available at no cost to the organizations that use it. So long as these SQL Servers do not host production workloads, then this edition is ideal for database development.

Starting in SQL Server 2025, a new edition is available for installation: SQL Server Developer Standard Edition. This article dives into this edition, the problems it solves, and why it is a great addition for development teams that use SQL Server!

Note that all images and features in this article are taken from SQL Server 2025 Community Technology Preview 1.1 and may change slightly between now and general release.

The challenge

SQL Server exists in many editions, each of which has their own sets of supported features. Of these, Enterprise Edition has the most all-encompassing set of features that are not available in other editions. A common development headache in the past has been when development occurs on Developer Edition, but production workloads reside on Standard Edition.

In these scenarios, developers could easily use a feature in their code that is available in Developer Edition, but not in Standard Edition. Similarly, performance features not available in Standard may make development workloads perform differently in production than in Development.

The result of this challenge is that time and resources are wasted when the version mismatch between development and production environments inevitably leads to errors or unexpected application behavior.

SQL Server Standard Developer Edition

When installing SQL Server 2025, a new edition is available in the drop-down menu:

This is new! Using this edition, a new installation will be created and used to test side-by-side with the traditional Developer edition. The remainder of the installation process will look similar to how it would if other installation options were chosen. This will be installed to a named instance called SQL2025STADEV, which differentiates it from a separate instance that is simply named SQL2025, which was created using the almighty Developer edition.

Once installed, a quick check of the SQL Server Services validates that all of my SQL Servers are running:

The default instance (MSSQLSERVER) is my previous SQL Server 2022 testing server, which will not be used here.

The Side-by-Side Comparison

The remainder of this article will be devoted to investigating the differences between Developer and Standard Developer editions and establishing the use-cases for an organization to run either or both editions for development purposes. When screenshots are provided, Developer edition will be shown first, and Standard Developer edition second.

First, a quick validation query will be run to confirm each server’s information and that queries are being run correctly against each:

The results indeed show that we are using SQL Server 2025 and that we are connected to each edition/instance for testing:

Next I will show you a few features where you can see a difference that may seem miniscule when writing test cases but can become quite troublesome when you are deploying code to production.

Intelligent Query Processing

An easy place to start in comparing these SQL Server installations is with Intelligent Query Processing (IQP). This set of features is heavily weighted towards enterprise-only and is easy to test. The following chart shows all IQP features and which editions they are available in.

Any circled in red are enterprise-only and we can choose a handful from that set to test here:

Batch mode adaptive joins fundamentally require batch mode to work. Batch mode on rowstore is an enterprise-only feature and therefore does not apply to rowstore indexes on any edition except for Enterprise. The following query reads from both a columnstore fact table and a rowstore dimension table:

The execution plan for Developer edition shows that an adaptive join was used, allowing the decision between a hash join and nested loops join to be deferred until runtime:

Alternatively, on Standard Developer edition, a hash match was immediately chosen, without the benefit of an adaptive join:

Without batch mode on rowstore being available, SQL Server chooses a different plan for each edition based on the optimization rules available via its features.

Depending on the complexity of queries running on a SQL Server, any or all of the IQP features may be used. Since IQP is mostly a set of automatically enabled features, the danger would be if a query parsed/binded/executed normally in both development and production environments but optimized/performed poorly in production due to missing features.

Index Rebuilds

Index maintenance has always been easy on Enterprise and a hassle on other editions. While index reorganize operations are online for all editions, rebuilds are offline operations on any edition except for Enterprise. While an offline rebuild is running, the index is unavailable for querying. If the index being rebuilt is the clustered index of a table, then the table is mostly unavailable.

Partitioning can help to alleviate this problem but is not a complete solution. Even with index maintenance running during low-usage times, blocking the table from usage may not be acceptable to the business.

For organizations that have pre-built tools that manage maintenance for them, those tools will typically use online rebuilds when available and revert to offline operations when unavailable. This means that when using Developer edition, rebuilds will always be online operations. In other words: They’ll hum along nicely, even for the largest indexes, and not block users trying to access tables undergoing maintenance at the time. In production, any edition besides Enterprise will revert to offline rebuilds and the experience will be very different.

Time to test! The following T-SQL will be run against both servers:

When executed on Developer edition, the operation runs normally. While running, queries against the table (such as the one that was used earlier) return results, without waiting. This is the expected behavior: The rebuild ran successfully and did so without blocking queries against the clustered index.

The result from the rebuild operation on Standard Developer edition is an immediate error message:

This mirrors the behavior of Standard edition where an attempt at an online rebuild will fail immediately. This is good! If I adjust the T-SQL to use an explicit offline rebuild, then it executes and completes successfully:

Note that resumable index rebuilds require online rebuilds and are therefore not available in Standard Edition.

Memory-Optimized TempDB Metadata

Memory-Optimized TempDB Metadata is a performance-enhancing featured that can have a significant impact on SQL Servers with workloads that rely heavily on TempDB. When enabled, some of the most commonly used and contentious metadata that describes temporary objects is stored in-memory, instead of on standard storage in TempDB.

This feature was added in SQL Server 2019 and is an easy win to reduce IO and contention in TempDB. The T-SQL to enable it is as follows:

The query runs successfully in Developer Edition and can be validated with the following query:

The results are as follows:

This shows that the configuration change was made but is pending restart to take effect.

When executed on SQL Server Standard Developer Edition, the result is an error message:

This is a scenario where receiving an error message is exactly what we want! This confirms that Memory-Optimized TempDB Metadata cannot be enabled on SQL Server Standard Edition, which is the expected result.

Interestingly enough, it is possible to “Turn off” this feature in Standard Edition without an error message:

This does not throw an error, but regardless of whether I try to turn it on or off in Standard Edition, the resulting values for the configuration aren’t affected and are what is expected:

The Future

This is immediately a great feature, but my next question is, “What’s next!?”. SQL Server comes in other editions, including Express and Web. While these editions get less attention, they are used by many organizations to host leaner database workloads.

Arguably, a Developer Edition built for either (or both) Web or Express would be more impactful than Standard Developer Edition, as the feature gap between Enterprise and Web/Express is much larger than between Enterprise and Standard. Of course Express is already free, but Web is not.

Regardless of future additions, if you happen to run Express or Web editions of SQL Server, then developing on Standard Developer edition will act to reduce the feature gap between development and production environments and is therefore worthwhile.

Conclusion

Creating editions of Developer Edition that mirror how production environments operate has been a long-time ask of Microsoft and they have delivered on that request! Each demonstration of an Enterprise Edition feature succeeded in Developer Edition but failed as expected in Standard Developer Edition.

If you are working in a SQL Server environment that relies on Standard Edition, then using Standard Developer Edition for development servers will provide an immediate benefit. This change will improve code/app predictability while ensuring that no one accidentally enables an Enterprise-only feature that creates skew between development and production servers.

If an app runs on Web or Express edition, then Standard Developer Edition does help to narrow the difference between production and development environments. This makes it worth installing SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition instead of the classic Developer Edition for any app that relies on a non-Enterprise edition of SQL Server