Q

What benefits can I get from using SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition?

A
SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition offers several unique features, including the ability to access more than 2GB of memory, support for failover clustering, and distributed partitioned views (aka federated database servers). However, even if you don't need any of these features, some performance optimizations are available only in the enterprise edition. For example, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition dynamically adjusts the maximum number of read-ahead pages based on the amount of memory present; the number of read-ahead pages is fixed in all other editions of SQL Server 2000. And only SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition lets multiple tasks share full-table scans.

Neither of these two performance optimizations is likely to provide an order-of-magnitude improvement in response time. However, if you need to squeeze every millisecond out of your application, you'll be glad that these two features kick in automatically when you install the enterprise edition. You don't need to manually configure them.