Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) unveiled a new Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition offering for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2.)

A blog post authored by exec Jeff Barr yesterday said the new, pre-configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) improves upon the Standard Edition by adding more computing power and memory. Standard allows for using up to 16 cores and 128 GiB of memory, while Enterprise can go up to 32 cores and 244 GiB of memory available in an extra-large instance.

The Enterprise Edition comes with SQL Server Enterprise Edition 2012 and SQL Server Enterprise Edition 2014, available in several regions, as explained in the AWS Marketplace.

Barr highlighted the following new and unique features of the offering:

• High availability lets users configure a primary database and up to four active, readable secondary databases into an Always-On availability group.
• Self-service business intelligence through Power View, used to interactively explore and visualize data.
• Data quality services let organizational and third-party reference data be used to profile, cleanse and match your own data.
• Online change functionality lets users restore files and file groups, alter schemas and make indexing changes while a database remains online.

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