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Using MSDE With Microsoft SoftGrid

Friday, 24 August 2007 by Michel Roth

The Softgrid Team blog has an entry up that is quite clear on the opinion that Microsoft has on the use of MDSE as the database platform for Microsoft Softgrid. It basically boils down to: "Only use it in test environments". The statement is primarily made in regards to support calls, in that Microsoft will make you upgrade to SQL server to see if the issue can be reproduced.

I can understand that MSDE , being free, is a challenge to support. Some of the reasons however that are given to make you think twice about using MSDE do not make a terrible lot of sense in my book. For example, the article mentions that "limited support for CPU's, limited support for RAM, a limit on db size, the lack of a SQL Agent job scheduling service as well as no support for enterprise management tools". The RAM, CPU and DB size bit isn't the deal breaker. I'm looking at a pretty decent Softgrid Database with around 250 applications with software metering enabled (albeit "young") and this database isn't even 13 MB. Nothing to shocking there. As for the management, I always use a free add-on for MSDE that works just like SQL Management Studio and works fine.

What is my point? Well, I don't really know but the fact of the matter is that MSDE is perfectly capable of running a normal Softgrid database... you're just out of luck should you ever need support ;-)