SQL 2000 & Vista

Hello.

Just in case anyone is interested, MS-SQL 2000 doesn't work on Vista. Which is a bugger ;o)

Still, the MS-SQL 2005 Developers edition is dirt cheap, £45 (inc vat & postage, Misco.co.uk), and that should work. It better, otherwise I'll have wasted some valuable beer tokens.

Goodbye.

Well, the real question is: What -does- work on Vista?

BTW, at least the client software for SQL 2000 still works on Vista, so you can have the server itself running on a different machine or a VM. Unfortunately, that still won't help MSDE users.

But if you want a real nice embedded database engine, I recommend VistaDB (www.vistadb.net). The engine itself even runs under Mono on Linux and Mac OS X. Pretty cool product with good support from its company and IMHO the best choice for .NET.

I thought SQL 2005 had an express version that was free (and restricted in some way)?

Yep SQL2005 Express with SP1 or SP2 is required for Vista. MSDE2000/SQL2000 definately won't work.

BTW, SQL2005 Express also has a Management program you can download which is as least as good as what came with SQL2000.

Well this is "by design" to get you to upgrade, rather than "by accident" because Vista is rubbish.

Unfortunately it (amongst other things) lacks the scheduler functionality, making it effectively a dumbed down version of MySQL.

It's a good reason for us not to upgrade our dev machines to Vista, seeing as our servers still run SQL2000 and we need to test/develop for the same. Congratulations Microsoft.

SQL is pants anyway:

You can run SQL 7 on XP. you can run SQL 2005 on XP. you can not run SQL 2000 on XP. Except the time-limited trial version, which will happily tell you that you have to install the full version after it expires, which will not install.

Very inconvenient if you have an app where the current version still requires 2000 and won't run with 2005.

Well you can run the developer version of it, otherwise I wouldn't be using it on XP. I'm sure you could run the enterprise version in theory, but that'd cost MS a sale of a server OS.

@xlsior: that sucks....

Actually one of the main reasons is so Microsoft can update it via Microsoft Update + it's around 30% faster. SQL2000 was based on previous SQL7 code where SQL2005 is written fron scratch.



Sorry but that is not correct.

Yeah, you can even run MSDE on XP. If you want to.

OK -- you can run MSDE and the developer edition, but not the SQL 2000 standard.
(Which was inconvenient since I did have a spare license for that one)

You should be able to run SQL2000 on XP no problem

Nope:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/system-requirements.mspx



Note the absence of XP in the top list. If you run the SQL 2000 Standard installer on XP, it will terminate with an 'unsupported operating system' message.

SQL 2005 Express Edition is free and you can use it for databases up to 4GB in size otherwise you get most of SQL 2005. Running SQL 2000 on XP isn't very useful anyway because of the connection restrictions on XP. IMHO the most efficient way to license SQL 2005 is to do it per processor that way you can have infinite connections and instances running on your server for a pretty low cost.

Of course if you don't want to pay anything at all and are prepared to do a little grunt work you can use MySQL 5.0 for everything except enterprise functionaly (and if you need enterprise functionality then you should be expecting to pay for it). I would guess for almost everyone on this forum MySQL does more than enough.

Darkheart