A qoute from "Client/Server Applications with Vsual FoxPro and SQL Server"


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MSDE vs. SQL Server

If MSDE sounds sort of like a free version of SQL Server, it isn’t. There are many differences between the two engines, the two biggest of which are: MSDE is tuned for five concurrent users and has no user interface at all. Following are some details of the differences between SQL Server 7.0 and MSDE.

User limitations

Microsoft says MSDE is tuned for five or fewer concurrent users. What does this really mean? Theoretically it means the server is likely to be actively handling requests from five users at the same time. But it doesn’t mean an MSDE system is limited to five users.

In order to explore the limits of this feature, we did some tests to attempt to determine how many users could be logged into MSDE at the same time and how performance was affected as the number of users went up. We were able to connect more than 100 users without a problem. However, there was a severe performance penalty as the number of users increased. With 15 or fewer connections, there seemed to be no difference in performance between MSDE and SQL Server 7.0 on similarly configured systems. But as soon as a sixteenth user was connected, everything slowed down dramatically. When 16 users were connected, everything was slower than with 15, even when only one user was actually doing anything.



Capacity limitations

Each MSDE database is limited to 2GB. Bigger databases require SQL Server.

No user interface

SQL Server ships with Enterprise Manager, Performance Monitor, Profiler, Query Analyzer and other great tools for administering SQL Server and designing/modifying databases. None of these tools are included in MSDE. However, if those tools exist on a network, they can be used to manage a MSDE server. We’ll discuss three other possible tools here: Microsoft Access 2000, Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 and in-house tools.

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Hope it helps.

Bernardo