Datasheet

⻬ High availability features: The entire SQL Server 2005 product family

offers numerous technologies to help keep your database up and run-

ning at all times. However, Express doesn’t offer these capabilities, all of

which reduce down time or help improve performance:

• Online restore

• Database mirroring

• Partitioning

• Failover clustering

• Online indexing

If you’re building a mission critical application and continual uptime is

of vital importance to you, you may want to deploy your solution on one

of the other SQL Server 2005 editions.

⻬ Rich programming language choices: The entire SQL Server 2005 prod-

uct line supports the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR). This

means that you can develop internal database logic such as stored pro-

cedures and triggers in any one of a number of popular programming

languages, rather than in SQL Server’s internal programming language:

Transact-SQL.

⻬ Analysis services: The more advanced editions of SQL Server 2005 fea-

ture business analytic logic that you can use to help make sense of your

information. This is especially true if your environment sports massive

volumes of data that need to be crunched to come up with recognizable

patterns. The bad news is that this is not present in SQL Server 2005

Express. However, the good news is that chances are that if these kinds

of data are found in your organization, you’ll have already purchased

one of the many third-party business intelligence products.

⻬ Report server: Users always want more information out of their data-

base. With SQL Server 2005’s reporting services, you can set up a wide

range of developer-driven and user-driven reports. You can then inte-

grate and deliver these communiqués through a series of different pre-

sentation technologies. Happily, you’ll find these capabilities present in

SQL Server 2005 Express with Advanced Services, which should help

please those finicky users. If you’re curious about how these features

work, take a look at Chapter 18 for the details.

⻬ Integration services: These features allow you to write powerful integra-

tion logic that can take information from a broad range of other data

storage locations and then store it inside SQL Server. The same holds

true for outbound data. Unfortunately, you won’t find these services pre-

sent in SQL Server 2005 Express. Luckily, this doesn’t mean that you

can’t integrate data among disparate systems; it just means that you

may have to do some more work to achieve the same results.

⻬ Notification services: This refers to the capability, found only in the

more feature-rich editions of SQL Server 2005, to build sophisticated

publish-and-subscribe applications. Once created, these applications

Part I: Welcome to SQL Server 2005 Express

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