Rob Farley in SQL Server Developer Edition versus SQL Server Standard/Enterprise excellently summarizes:
Developer Edition is just Enterprise Edition without the license to be used in a Production environment. Also, it doesn't need to be installed on a Server OS (ie, you can put it on Win7, Vista, XP).
Also, my experience shows that Developer Edition outperforms Enterprise Ed in the same equal conditions (on the same machine, etc.)
Why cannot MS SQL Server be used (or, even, installed) on workstation Windows (XP/7) in production?
I am interested in technical aspect of the issue.
Plz put licensing and ethical aspects outside of this thread (open your own if you feel up to
It actually is only a licensing problem. There's nothing at all preventing the full SQL Server to run on a workstation O.S., unless you need some very specific features that are available only on it (like failover clustering).
As you said, "Developer Edition is just Enterprise Edition without the license to be used in a Production environment". Nothing else than a license problem. But the software is exactly the same (apart from branding and O.S. version checks during setup).
The only "technical" reason you can't run SQL Server Enterprise on a non-server O.S. is "because the installer will not let you do that".