Harnessing the Power of SQL Server Express Edition for your small business

As a small business owner you are quite likely to experience repeated pressures from your employees to upgrade your systems and to invest in new technology. At some stage of your growth curve, you may need to run corporate applications that require a server database. While you may be tempted to use an open source database solution like My SQL or go in for a file sharing database system like Ms Access, both the options can lead to significant perils. An Access database has severe limitations and is unlikely to help you if you suddenly need more concurrent users to run the application. While on the other hand the My SQL database, while being an excellent tool in hands of a trained crew, can in fact land you into maintenance issues and can be a nightmare if your team is not an expert on it. While you can consider investing in a full fledged enterprise database system, the cost of taking a corporate license would be prohibitive. In such a scenario opting for the SQL Server Express edition would be the ideal choice as it is very straight forward to use and finding the right support for it is quite easy. Moreover the fact that it does not cost you a dime that makes it a logical choice over any open source database application in vogue today. 

SQL Server Express Edition – Key Features

With a very generous limit of 10GB storage, the SQL Server Express edition meets the need of nearly every small business out there. Moreover it helps you create the perfect platform to move up to the enterprise edition, when your business grows substantially.

The Express edition is capable of helping you build applications that are location aware and can be hosted on the internet. It also comes with a set of refined reporting services that help you draw meaning from the encompassed data. A whole set of custom reports can be created and data can be exported to Ms Word and Excel for further study. While the free license is limited to single CPU, it allows support for multiple cores. Thus you can run the application on very powerful server and use it for corporate applications. It also limits the amount of system memory usage to 1Gb which is typically enough for small business applications. It is also important to note that with its LocalDB feature you can even run desktop applications with it. 

Backup tips to keep in mind

When you are running the Express edition, you need to be doubly sure about adhering to a strict backup schedule. It is also suggested that you go in for a minimum RAID 5 standard data redundancy. Moreover you should invest in a state of the art recover sql tool like the DataNumen SQL Recovery which can bring back your comprised data in case of a SQL crash. 

Author Introduction:

Alan Chen is President & Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including access recovery and sql recovery software products. For more information visit http://www.datanumen.com/