At VMworld in Barcelona this year there arose a question regarding SQL Server Standard edition and if it is NUMA aware. I was certain the answer was “yes”, but it was pointed out to me that the documentation says otherwise.
Sure enough, here is the relevant piece of information from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/editions-and-components-of-sql-server-2016?view=sql-server-2017:
This was a topic for discussion because I’m always reminding people about the benefits of being able to run a SQL Server workload inside of a single NUMA node when possible. So I was taken aback when people were pointing out that SQL Server Standard edition was not NUMA aware.
It didn’t take long for me to find some relevant links about SQL Server and NUMA, because I’ve got a list of posts regarding SQL Server 2016. At the bottom of that post is a link to this post by Bob Ward:
How It Works (It Just Runs Faster): Auto Soft NUMA
Bob clearly talks about SQL Server Standard edition and soft NUMA in the post. However, there is also a quote in there that is worth noting:
“Standard Edition and CAL based licensing can restrict how many processors SQL Server can use.”
Bob Ward
And thus, we start to understand why the documentation suggests that SQL Server Standard edition is not NUMA aware. It’s because Standard has limits on the amount of hardware available.
This is leading to confusion for SQL Server customers. It would be better for Microsoft to update the documentation to reflect that SQL Server Standard is NUMA aware. Perhaps add an additional footnote, as they have footnotes for other features in that same section.
I like that idea so much I decided to do my first pull request for Microsoft documentation.
Here’s hoping they like my suggestion enough to consider updating the documentation and remove the confusion for customers.
Since this just came up on Twitter again…
The feature is NUMA Aware Large Page Memory and Buffer Allocation, the extra “and” is the documentation mistake there, because this IS an Enterprise Feature with TF 834 and LPIM on 16GB RAM or more. You can’t do that in Standard Edition.
If you look at the BOL topic for SQL Server 2014, you can see the feature name as NUMA Aware Large Page Memory and Buffer Allocation, so somewhere after 2014 someone messed up the name of the feature, adding the additional “and” to the name making it incorrect:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/getting-started/features-supported-by-the-editions-of-sql-server-2014?view=sql-server-2014
We are in FEBR 2022 and they have not changed a thing in the documentation where the compare all the versions. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/editions-and-components-of-sql-server-version-15?view=sql-server-ver15