April 4, 2008 at 7:56 am
Hi,
I am new to SQL server and I am not sure if this has been asked before or if it is a silly question. I am interested to know that anyone has some statistics on the real world differences in performance between SQL server and SQL server express. I run a medical application which uses SQL server as the database. It contains about 15,000 patient records and it can be quite slow. The application that I use was developed for medical practices and ships with SQL server express but I do have the option of upgrading at my own expense to full SQL server. My server is a quad core Xeon. It has to SAS drives in Raid 1 configuration.There are up to five users connected to the network at any one time.
I have no need for any of the tools in the full SQL server. My main interest is maximising the speed. Any feedback in real-world situations that compares it to additions would be very helpful.
Thank you
Simon
April 4, 2008 at 10:57 am
you definitely won't get any performance benefit by downgrading to sql server express since
a) express can only utilize 1 CPU core while other versions can use multiple cores
b) express can only utilize 1GB while other versions can use more
if a db of only 15K entries is slow, then it needs optimization -- not hardware or sql server version changes.
April 4, 2008 at 11:29 am
If I understand correctly, you are currently using SQL Server Express for the database. If that's correct, an upgrade very well might improve your applications speed a bit.
SQL Express can only use one CPU core at a time, and since you have 4, that might help. It can only address a limited amount of memory, and can only process a small number of concurrent queries. Thus, it might increase speed somewhat, since a higher version of SQL Server will use more CPU cores, more memory, and handle concurrent users better.
BUT, I agree with Antonio, that with a database that small, the most likely problem is badly written code, badly fragmented tables, fragmented/missing/poorly-designed indexes, and/or missing/out-of-date statistics.
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