Limitations of SQL Server Express

Question

My hosting provider  Rackspace  is offering a fully managed dedicated server with SQL Server Web version    installed  My company handles web development  and has about 20  clients using ASP Net   SQL Server 2005    I am thinking of cutting down costs by installing the free SQL Server 2008 Express instead  I am aware of the 1GB RAM and 4GB database  is that correct   limitations  What I would like to know is    Is there any limit to the NUMBER of databases I can install with the express edition  Are there any other limitations I should be wary of  I am a bit concerned about having to set up the database backup - with the express edition it might a lot more difficult  Any other advise

User · Answer

Another limitation to consider is that SQL Server Express editions go into an idle mode after a period of disuse.

Understanding SQL Express behavior: Idle time resource usage, AUTO_CLOSE and User Instances:

When SQL Express is idle it aggressively trims back the working memory set by writing the cached data back to disk and releasing the memory.

But this is easily worked around: Is there a way to stop SQL Express 2008 from Idling?

User · Answer

You can create user instances and have each app talk to its very own SQL Express   There is no limit on the number of databases

User · Answer

It seems like the database size limitation has been increased to 10GB   good new  http   blogs msdn com b sqlexpress archive 2010 04 21 database-size-limit-increased-to-10gb-in-sql-server-2008-r2-express aspx

User · Answer

If you switch from Web to Express you will no longer be able to use the SQL Server Agent service so you need to set up a different scheduler for maintenance and backups

User · Answer

There are a number of limitations  notably    Constrained to a single CPU  in 2012  this limitation has been changed to  The lesser of one socket or four cores   so multi-threading is possible  1GB RAM  Same in 2008 2012  4GB database size  raised to 10GB in SQL 2008 R2 and SQL 2012  per database   http   www dotnetspider com tutorials SqlServer-Tutorial-158 aspx http   www microsoft com sqlserver 2008 en us editions aspx  With regards to the number of databases  this MSDN article says there s no limit       The 4 GB database size limit applies   only to data files and not to log   files  However  there are no limits to   the number of databases that can be   attached to the server    However  as mentioned in the comments and above  the database size limit was raised to 10GB in 2008 R2 and 2012  Also  this 10GB limit only applies to relational data  and Filestream data does not count towards this limit  http   msdn microsoft com en-us library bb895334 aspx

User · Answer

You can t install Integration Services with it  Express does not support Integration Services  So if you want build say SSIS-packages you ll need at least Standard Edition    See more here

[sql-server] Limitations of SQL Server Express

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