SQL2005 Express Edition is Microsoft's follow up to MSDE2000. MSDE picked up tons of following and has been in use all over the place. Unfortunately for a web application it really didn't cut it and would be quickly outgrown. SQL2005 EE will replace MSDE and doesn't have the same 20 concurrent connections limitation that MSDE had. Here's the new limitations for SQL2005 Express Edition: – No query or workload governor (this is a big plus) – Limited to 1GB of RAM, it doesn't sound like alot but it's more than enough for most servers – Database sizes limited to 4GB in size. Again this is HUGE for databases most databases never make it over 20MB. – No Clustering (not an issue for most) – No Mirroring (not an issue for most) – No DTS (okay maybe a problem for some, but most don't use it) – No Full Text Search (okay, this is kind of bad, you won't be running sharepoing on express and probably most forums use full text for their search now too) – No Notification Services (what you don't get enough pages already?) – Replication as a subscriber only, still makes it a worthy backup server solution – No Analysis Services (no comment) – Service Broker, subscriber only – No Built in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) but you can download this from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=82AFBD59-57A4-455E-A2D6-1D4C98D40F6E&displaylang=en – No Reporting Services, that's a tiny ouch. – No backup/restore utility, this can be fixed via http://www.sqldbatips.com/showarticle.asp?ID=27 – No job scheduling (aka SQL Agent service) I think that's all of them but I'm not SQL expert so I probably missed some of them. I think the big limiting factor here is going to be no backup and restore utility. I'm off to install SQL express myself now though and see how she does…
