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Distributing SQL Server Solutions
(Scott Regan/Cynthia Sample)

July 7 - Microsoft now offers a variety of database engines - Jet, SQL Server and MSDE. This session spelt out which products to use where and the licensing implications.
    MSDE (MicroSoft Database Engine) is a new database engine from Microsoft. It is based on SQL Server and is guaranteed to be 100 per cent code compatible. This new engine is like SQL Server, but with several major differences.

• It is royalty free, so you can distribute it freely with your applications via Office Developer 2000 and Visual Studio 6.0.
• It is 'performance-throttled' to about five users.
• It has a smaller disk footprint that SQL Server (40 Mb).

Access has been used as an RDBMS for years, and you can of course still use it that way. However Access 2000 allows you to develop, not only against the Jet engine, but also against MSDE. Microsoft is now recommending that you increasingly think of Access more as a user interface to MSDE and SQL Server rather than as a tool for generating complete, stand-alone databases.
    Many Access applications start as single user and end up as multi-user applications. In order to minimise the pain of upsizing the application, Microsoft now recommends that you use the MSDE option in Access unless you have good reason not to do so. 
    Apparently every CD with Access 2000 on it also has MSDE. To find it go to 'help', type in 'project', select 'Work with a Microsoft project', then 'Learn about Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). Finally, select 'Installing MSDE' and from there you are recommended to read the help files for the correct command line options.
    A major point made at the session was that, while MSDE is licence free and will happily act as a multi-user RDBMS engine, after about five users the performance is designed to drop (so called 'performance throttling'). This isn't done by counting the number of users, and several members of the audience reported satisfactory performance with more than five. In fact the performance throttling is controlled by the load on the server. It is however designed to kick when more than five 'average' users are working.
    If the number grows to more than five, it is considered that you should perhaps be using a licensed product like SQL Server. Anything that talks to SQL Server needs a Client Access Licence. So, licensing is simple: as soon as you introduce SQL Server into any part of your database application, the normal licensing rules for that product apply. 

Mark Whitehorn

Article: 
SQL Server 7.0 reviewed

figure 1: selecting the Access Project option