Editions of Notification Services

Notification Services is available with the following editions of SQL Server 2005: Developer Edition, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Evaluation Edition. For Notification Services, Developer Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Evaluation Edition all have the same functionality. However, the Standard Edition of Notification Services has some limitations.

Differences Between Notification Services Editions

Notification Services editions differ in the following ways:

  • Notification Services Standard Edition is intended for small to medium applications that run on one server. Some options, including the number of generator threads, distributor threads, notifications per batch, and delivery choices, are limited in Standard Edition.
  • Notification Services Enterprise Edition is intended for medium to large applications. Instances of Notification Services that run on Enterprise Edition can be scaled across multiple servers. With Enterprise Edition, you can customize the number of generator and distributor threads as well as the size of notification batches. It also supports multicast delivery.
  • Notification Services Developer Edition is intended for application development.
  • Notification Services Evaluation Edition is trial software with a time limitation.

The following table shows the functional differences between editions of Notification Services.

Feature Standard Edition support Enterprise, Developer, and Evaluation Edition support

Scale-out deployments

Not supported

Supported

Generator threads per instance

1

Up to 25

Distributor threads per instance

Up to 3

Unlimited

Notification batch size

Cannot be adjusted

Can be adjusted

Multicast delivery

Not supported

Supported

CPUs

Up to 4

Unlimited

See Also

Other Resources

Migrating Notification Services Instances
Introducing Notification Services Programming

Help and Information

Getting SQL Server 2005 Assistance