Executive summary
In addition to increased CPU and memory limits, we are making another change to benefit customers using the SQL Server Standard edition.
Starting with SQL Server 2025, resource governor, previously an Enterprise edition feature, is also available in the Standard edition.
A powerful tool
Resource governor has been a part of SQL Server for more than 15 years. It’s a powerful, full-featured tool that improves reliability when multiple applications or users share resources on the same SQL Server instance.
We rely on Resource Governor to isolate workloads on our SQL Server instances by controlling CPU and memory usage. It helps us ensure that the core of our trading systems remains stable and runs with predictable performance, even when other parts of the systems share the same servers.
- Ola Hallengren, Chief Data Platforms Engineer at Saxo Bank and a Data Platform MVP
Yet when we ask customers if they use resource governor, a frequent answer is "We can't. We are on Standard edition." Indeed, ever since its initial release, resource governor has been an Enterprise-only feature. That made it less known and less commonly used than it deserves.
We heard and acted on your feedback. Starting with SQL Server 2025, resource governor is available in both Standard and Enterprise editions, with identical capabilities. This includes the respective Developer editions as well.
In Azure SQL Managed Instance, resource governor is already available in all service tiers.
What can it do?
Here are just some of the things you can accomplish using resource governor:
- Limit or reserve CPU bandwidth and IOPS for a workload.
- Limit the size of query memory grants or reserve memory for query processing.
- Limit the total number of running requests (queries) for a workload.
- Abort query batches that exceed a specified amount of CPU time.
- Set a hard cap on the maximum degree of parallelism (MAXDOP) for queries.
- (New in SQL Server 2025) Limit the amount of tempdb space a workload can use.
Whether you are on Standard or Enterprise edition, if you haven't used resource governor yet, see what it can do for you.
To help you learn, we have a new step-by-step guide with best practices and examples, from simple to more advanced. There is also a separate guide focusing on the new tempdb space governance feature.
Conclusion
With this change, customers on Standard edition get a powerful enterprise-grade tool to control resource contention and improve reliability of their SQL Server environments. We encourage you to learn more about resource governor to understand the full range of its capabilities.
Have questions or feedback? Post a comment on this blog post, an idea at https://aka.ms/sqlfeedback, or email us at sql-rg-feedback@microsoft.com.
Let’s make resource governor a standard (😊) tool in your toolset!
Microsoft