>>I'm running a 2005 express now, after years of MSDE. Behaves the same, AFAIK, except that it keeps eating memory. I'm testing a routine which does summon a bunch of tables, maybe a dozen or so, and returns about twenty cursors. My guesstimate is that the total size of the cursors returned is below one megabyte, and it may update some fields in one or two tables, whose total size is around one megabyte.
>>
>>Why does then SqlExpress eat up to 800 megs while doing that? I can see in the Task Manager the memory being returned after I restart the service. Is there a setting somewhere? Can it somehow flush its buffers and return to dormant state when not in use for a while?
>>
>>Or is this the price of the freebie.
>
>Hi Dragan,
>
>Not an answer to your question, but we were discussing SQL Express yesterday with my colleague. Can you tell me what are the limitations of SQL Express comparing with the full blown SQL Server?

Can't help you there, I've installed it as a replacement for MSDE, and am using it as one. I didn't see any of the tools with it, apart from some silly "surface area" dialog - both words mean 'poverhnost' to me - where it seems to be capable of turning pieces of it on and off, like using named pipes or tcp/ip, allow access from other machines or not, have XML export turned on or off etc. I'm not missing the Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer at all; whatever they can do can be scripted and run from command window (or data explorer in VFP), or even better in Toad for SQL. Although, the Toad is equally guilty of a nasty memory appetite - about 130 megabytes just to load and to browse a single table (written in dot net, what can one expect).