>>I guess your experience is more relevant to Kevin's situation - on-site, hands-on installation. My thinking was coloured by a situation we will be facing when the application I'm currently working on is rolled out. Based on the current customer profile there will be :
>>A few large users who will want to use existing instances of SQL2000/2005/2008 to be used as the data store
>>A few more large users who will not have existing SQL servers but will require SQL2008 for 50+ users,
>>A much larger number of users (~2000) whose requirement is for a simple single computer, single user installation.
>>
>>The first two groups are obviously large enough to warrant having someone take the time to travel to the site and make a custom installation - we wouldn't even try to build an automated installation process.
>>
>>But that's not the case with the last group - the software revenue would not justify even spending an hour on the installation. So the jury is still out on whether to use SQL-CE or SQL2008 Express for these (database size will not be a factor - even the large users only use comparatively puny tables). My gut feeling is that if I hired someone to create the installer for this using SQL2008 and agreed to pay them $10 for every successful installation on condition that they paid me $50 for every fail then I would be making a substantial profit (but taking a lot of grief from the customers)
>>
>>I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has successfully created a fully-automated install package for an application using SQL2008 Express that installed successfully on, say, 95% of sites.......
>>Best,
>>Viv
>
>
>Will the last group be connected to the internet ? And if so, any means of hosting a large database for them ?

Odd that you should mention that.
Yes - a reasonable proportion of that group do have internet access - but not always directly from the machine hosting the application. Annoyingly the company has no hard statistics on this but we estimate maybe 50% - and assume that, over time, this percentage will increase rather than decrease.

The application is *very* graphics orientated and ships with a database of re-usable objects (more are added on a regular basis) and we are experimenting with a internet based SQL2005 database for these. At the moment the new version of the app can access this database directly (ie from .NET using a regular SQL connection although we may back off from that and insert a web-services layer) to allow users to browse available objects and import those that they may wish to use into their local database.

But we *are* toying with the idea of allowing end users to store *all* of their data on this server - as mentioned earlier most users only need a few hundred records spread across a dozen tables. Whether we eventually decide to take that route will be more of a political decision than anything else. But, just in case, the database is designed so that a single instance on this server can handle data belonging to multiple sites/owners.

Anyway, all that said, we are still left with a significant number of 'small' users who will not have Internet access and we still have to decide whether to use CE for these.....