SQL Server 2008 Express features and variation from previous version
Flood of questions fromthe users during a recent usergroup meeting.
- What will the specification for the SQL Server 2008 Express version be?
- What will be the differences between it and the 2005 version, not with MSDE?
- How about SQL Agent attachment to the SQL Express engine?
- Any memory limitations and CPU limit?
I can say there isn't much difference betwen SQL Server Express edition 2005 and 2008, as usual the physical limitations for SQL Express 2008 are similar, such as:
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1 CPU socket
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1 GB memory
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4 GB of user data per database
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Within Advanced Services - sqlcmd and osql utilities
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Integration with Visual Studio
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Replication (as a subscriber only)
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Subset features for Reporting Services
As it became in SQL Server 2005, the FullText search is a part of SQL Server engine and similarly the SQL Server Management Studio Express, a graphical management tool that is based on SQL Server Management Studio that makes it easy to manage and administer SQL Server Express databases. On top of the Reporting Services as an integrated report creation and design environment to create reports with Full-text Search, a powerful search engine for searching text-intensive data.
Not only this now the SQL Server Express supports Service Broker, but direct communication between two SQL Server Express servers is not supported. Finally to enlighten you can now use the Dedicated Administrator Connection feature for SQL Server Express is supported with the trace flag 7806.
A list of features that are not supported (source 2008 BOL):
| SQL Server features not supported in SQL Server Express |
SQL Server features from previous versions not supported in SQL Server Express |
|
Database mirroring |
SQL Mail |
|
Online restore |
Fail-over clustering |
|
Database snapshot |
Distributed partitioned views |
|
Parallel index operations |
VIA protocol support |
|
Mirrored media sets |
Log shipping |
|
Partitioning |
Parallel DBCC |
|
Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) |
Parallel Create Index |
|
Hot-add memory |
Enhanced Read Ahead and Scan |
|
Native HTTP SOAP access |
Indexed views (materialized views) |
|
SQL Mail and Database Mail |
Partitioned views |
|
Online Index Operations |
|
|
SQL Server Agent and SQL Server Agent Service |
