SQL Server Standard Processor Use

Hello -



Regarding Standard vs Enterprise processor usage, I have read the SQL2K5 edition comparison articles that MS puts out, but I recently viewed a webcast that gave me cause for concern.



There was a webcast called "Selecting the Right SQL Server 2005 Edition", hosted by Michael Raheem, where he stated that although Standard edition allowed 4 processors (based on sockets, not cores) some index operations only leveraged one core at a time. So even if you have, let's say, 4 dual core CPUs (= 8 processor cores), only one core at a time will be used, and the rest will be idle during that operation.



Can anyone give a better idea of which operations are full multi-core in SQL Standard. Michael mentions indexing - does that mean strictly explicit reindexing operations which are part of a maintenance routine, or does that apply to index operations during normal inserts and/or updates?



We will be using this to run a backend for a commercial website, and we need to be sure whether we can get by with Standard or we need to make the investment in Enterprise.



Thanks