SQL 2005 Express is a great little server from Microsoft that allows you to run a slimmed down version of SQL Server 2005 for free. You can even use it to host websites, and as long as your individual databases don't run over 4GB of storage, and you don't care about using more than 2GB of RAM, it might be the perfect candidate for your environment.

The reason Microsoft did this is to fight back against the free products from other vendors. Other alternatives include PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle Lite among others. With the release of this free Express edition of SQL Server, Microsoft aims to get people to use SQL Server, and keep customers from flocking to open source alternatives. Once they have you locked it, they are hoping that at some point you will either need the tools or features that are offered by the SQL Server 2005 Standard or that you will hit the 4GB database limit.

Since SQL Server Express 2005 was first released, people complained that it didn't provide full text search capabilities, among other things. With Service Pack 1, Microsoft has addressed this concern and others.

What many people don't know, however, is that part of the SP1 you can also download the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit SP1, which includes an Import/Export wizard, among other things. Just download it here and you will get the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard installed by default to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTSWizard.exe". You can even create a link to it straight from the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express by going to Tools->External Tools and defining and Import/Export Wizard shortcut, by pointing the command parameter to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTSWizard.exe"

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2007 at 1:58 PM and has received 38193 views. There are currently 156 comments. Print this entry.