Your link to the features doesn't work or isn't there.

The main limitations I've heard are:

-4GB total file size
-mixed reports of max 25 simultaneous connections.
-no mechanism to schedule events, etc (but I've seen products that do this...but something is not right about paying for products to support a free product).

Still sounds good for smaller businesses/apps/sites. I guess they don't want to lose overall penetration to the likes of MySQL. Sounds like a good idea and they'll still be making the big bucks off the corporate clients, esp since they increased the price of SQL 2k5 20% or so over SQL 2k.

Fixed the link.

The limitations seem very acceptable for the savings in price.

I thought this was just the next generation of the SQL Server Desktop Engine, which was intended for development & embedding in SQL-based products but was limited to a smaller DB size & 10 simultaneous connections.

And having used MySql a ton over the past 2 years, there seems to be little danger of SQL Server "losing" penetration to those clowns. They're just now FINALLY delivering decent UI management tools but due to the open source nature, nasty little bugs pop up every now and then when you least expect them. MySql is great for a personal site or for fun but I would never trust it for a deployed software product again.

Your assumptions are correct, except I guess Gibson says that it does up to 25 connections, and you can now run websites off of it.

My my calculations (read guess) 95% of all of the websites that I've done could easily use SQL Server 2005 Express and see no reduction in anything. And that is a heafty cost savings all around.

http://www.aspfaq.com/show.asp?id=2343

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/sql/SQL_081004.mspx

Q: Dave_MS, are you saying that Express will handle more than 5 connections, but with reduced performance? I recall reading somewhere that the number of connections was limited.
A: SQL Express will handle connections exactly as higher editions, ie no reduced perf for Express. There is a limit on the overall number of connections - this is the same as other editions and is many of thousands.

Well Jerry, it sounds like you've jumped ship from MySQL just when things are getting good for them. They've added a lot of good stuff in v5 and have major backing from SAP (like IBM to Linux) in order to make them enterprise-capable as an alternative to Oracle (SAP's major competition in the business apps market).

I am looking more into MySQL at the moment. SQL Express sounds damn good, but I am worried about getting locked into their feature set if I use it too long, which I'm sure is part of the plan anyway. Overall, I'm generally happy with the SQL 2000 feature set though.

According to one of the links I posted above the 5 and 10 connection limits are OS limits and not SQL. If you were running SQL Express on a server OS, it seems like you would have unlimited connections.