Rant from Brian Randell about SQL Express. He answers Sam Gentile's rant that SQL Express is not ready for the customers even in its beta variant. Brian says actually that it IS ready for being "just beta 1" or "repalcement for MSDE". There are other folks writing about the issue. However all of them forget one small but important issue - the last version of MSSQL came out to the world in early 2000. It will be 5.5 years between the releases. It does not help that SQL Express team says that GUI tools would come out in august, they are not ready yet. Remember, the last version of VS is called 2003 and the folks have doubled the amount of classes in asp.net for example since then. I think that they had more than enough time to do something. August ? Why does it matter when they had 4.5 years to do the job ?
# re: SQL Express is not ready yet
Forget all of the negativity. SQL Express is a great next product. MSDE is still around and does what it needs to do. SE looks to be a better and lighter weight tool that replaces MSDE. CLR seems to make it much more flexible. At this time I can't imagine anything I would uses SE for that can't be done given the model as it is.
I am sure the beta process will solve the issues irritating the community. After all, most of us are still nagging about the deficiencies in MSDE/SQS2000 even all of the new additions that it has grown over the years.
MSDE still has it's quirks on install. It takes careful attention to build the installer for ANY environment. What happens when the third and fourth vendors install their instances - hmmm. Ever install Veritus Enterprise Backup on a server with SQS2000 already installed. SOmetimes it's not pretty.
XCOPY deployment should help resolve this issue. The recommendation for one instance will throw some vendors for a loop I am sure.
Anyway - I think we will all like the released product.
As for the XM issues. It is pretty easy to find your way around express. No docs. It's still SQLServer. SQLCMD threw me until I caught it in a blog. Just seeing the SQLCMD reminded me that the generic bootstrap for SQS had to be the answer "osql" won't find the instance currently - actually it thinks it does if SQLServer is installed but seems to really point at the base SQS instance.
The Express IDE canmangae the database quite well if you ignore some of the betabugs. Loading the NW SQS2000 script works flawlessly. Now let's throw a really tough script at it.
The really important reson for having SE is that we can try out the CLR for building UDFs and TYPES. This is the best of the extension technology which I have been waiting for for years. Safer, easier and more flexible than using "C".
Who can build XM faster than MS? By next week someone will have posted it. Keep blogging - this is getting better all of the time.
# re: SQL Express is not ready yet
HELP!
I have a big data base built in SQL express. Now I am trying to deploy to a host, but they only know how to import/export from a SQL server. I cannot find anywhere how to transfer my SQL database from the development environment to the production host server. I just can't find anything about this. What am I missing????
Mitch
# re: SQL Express is not ready yet
Mitch: try to send them your mdf/ldf files.
