SQL Server 2005 Express Limitation

Functionally, SQL Server Express is in many ways the same as the full edition of SQL Server. Many databases created in other editions of SQL Server can work transparently.

The limitations to Express, however, need to be spelled out in detail:

• No built-in management tools. Microsoft has a query tool called Express Manager that is available as a separate download, but as of this writing, it is an unsupported pre-release package.



• Support for only 1 CPU. In systems with multiple CPUs, Express will only bind to one CPU at a time, and it cannot run queries in parallel.



• 1 GB RAM. Express cannot use more than 1 GB of RAM at a time for queries and data pages. The program's own memory footprint is not counted.



• 4 GB maximum database size. No one database in Express can be larger than 4 GB, but there is no limit on the number of databases you can use in Express.



• No analysis or reporting services. Data mining, Data Transformation Services (DTS) and reporting functions are not available for Express.



• Other functions not available in Express include clustering or mirroring, full-text indexing or searching, SQLMail, indexed views, partitioned views and SQL Agent.
  

If the environment or application you're working on requires any of these, the full version of SQL Server may be the better choice rather than trying to work around the limitations of Express. Sometimes workarounds are possible -- SQL Agent functions, for instance, might be mimicked through VBScript and the Task Scheduler -- but for projects with a broad scope, it might be easier to use the full edition of SQL Server.