Differences between Enterprise and Standard editions.

I have been given the "Performance and Scalability Guide" for Forefront Client Security by one of our representatives from Microsoft. The document is listed as published in July 2007, so I apparently can not supply a link. The document makes a couple of hard to swallow claims, though. One of these is this:

The sizing differences between SQL Server Standard Edition and SQL Server Enterprise edition are due to the differences in the index sizes between the two editions.

I have to say I do not buy this. Can anyone disillusion me, or give me a link to anything that even implies this? I have not found anything to prove or disprove this, as yet.

Another oddity in this document is that FCS will not support 64 bit SQL Server, but encourages the use of AWE and /3GB. I can not believe there are functionality differences between the two, unless their database performance is negatively impacted by the 64 bit architecture (naturally the document is silent on why they do not support 64 bit).

Anyway, the questions are does the quote above actually hold any water? And would 64 bit SQL server cause functionality problems, other than performance problems?
Enterprise adds "features" to Standard, besides the CPU/Memory sizes, they are not differences in functionality. See http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/features/compare-features.mspx

The only "index" difference, is the ability to have indexed views in Enterprise work better.

Most software does not support 64bit because the OS, not the SQL. The 64bit OS is totally different and requires different configurations, drivers, etc. The /3GB and /AWE are 32bit options and have nothing to do with 64 bit.

I would bet it will work fine on 64bit. They probably have not tested it extensively.

Make sure if you use 64bit you have ODBC drivers for 64bit for any other external databases. Many ODBC drivers are not compatible with 64bit.

|||Tom is correct that the main difference between Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition is that Enterprise has additional features such as Online Index creation that Standard Edition does not have. If you are running SQL Server 2005 on a dedicated machine, I have never seen any issues with 64-bit vs. 32-bit in terms of application compatibility. The file formats for SQL Server data files are the same between 32 and 64-bit|||Thanks, guys. That is pretty much as I had thought. I have sent our representative at Microsoft a few of these questions, and hopefully will get some answers I can use.