I'm running a SQL EXPRESS 2005 server currently hosting ~50 databases. The databases serve clients' CMS/eCommerce websites. The connections are to a single instance, no user attached instances are being used. Median DB size is 5MB, the largest 20MB. The website are mostly low traffic, the CPU utilization is < 10%, and the SQL process uses at most 350MB RAM.
For now I'm well within the SQL server express limits of 1CPU/1GB RAM. In the upcoming expansion the number of databases may double. If I assume linear growth in requirements, the 1GB limit still wont be reached. But I'm concerned the number (> 100) of databases may become an issue. I'm not sure if this usage scenario is what Microsoft had in mind for express.
Is there any information or preferably real-world experience regarding SQL server express capability to handle lots of small databases? Can I expect it to run 150 databases, or should I start working on migrating to other database servers/file-based databases?
Answer
According to the SQL Server 2005 Express edition overview:
there are no limits to the number of
databases that can be attached to the
server.
So, the limit is how much performance you can utilise of the server. Consider that as the express edition will only use one CPU core, if you have a quad core processor it can not use more than 25%.
If you later on find that you need to utilise more of the server's performance, you can quite easily upgrade to a different version of SQL Server.
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