SQL Server Express Features

SQL Server 2008 Express is based on SQL Server, and supports most of the Database Engine features of that product. 

Nota

If you create and design a database in SQL Server Express, you can migrate this database to SQL Server. However, you will not be able to use the SQL Server Express database together with earlier versions of SQL Server. This includes SQL Server 2000.

SQL Server Express Feature Support

SQL Server Express supports most of the features and functionality of SQL Server. The following table lists some of the major features and components that are supported.

Stored Procedures	SQL Server Configuration Manager
Views	Replication (as a subscriber only)
Triggers	Advanced Query Optimizer
Cursors	SMO/RMO
sqlcmd and osql utilities	Integration with Visual Studio 2005
Snapshot Isolation Levels	Service Broker (as a client only)¹
Native XML support, including XQuery and XML Schemas	SQL CLR
Transact-SQL language support	Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS)
Dedicated Administrator Connection²	Import/Export Wizard

¹ SQL Server Express supports Service Broker, but direct communication between two SQL Server Express servers is not supported.

² The Dedicated Administrator Connection feature for SQL Server Express is supported with the trace flag 7806. For more information on trace flags and Dedicated Administrator Connection, and Using a Dedicated Administrator Connection in SQL Server Books Online.

Security Note
During setup of SQL Server Express a login is added for the BUILTIN\Users group. This allows all authenticated users of the computer to access the instance of SQL Server Express as a member of the public role. The BUILTIN\Users login can be safely removed to restrict Database Engine access to computer users who have individual logins or are members of other Windows groups with logins.

SQL Server Features Not Supported in SQL Server Express

The following table lists the additional SQL Server database features that are not supported in this version of SQL Server Express. It also lists database features from previous versions of SQL Server that are not supported.

SQL Server features not supported in SQL Server Express	SQL Server features from previous versions not supported in SQL Server Express
Database mirroring	SQL Mail
Online restore	Fail-over clustering
Database snapshot	Distributed partitioned views
Parallel index operations	VIA protocol support
Mirrored media sets	Log shipping
Partitioning	Parallel DBCC
Address Windowing Extensions (AWE)	Parallel Create Index
Hot-add memory	Enhanced Read Ahead and Scan
Native HTTP SOAP access	Indexed views (materialized views)
SQL Mail and Database Mail	Partitioned views
Online Index Operations
SQL Server Agent and SQL Server Agent Service

The following list highlights the major SQL Server components that are not supported in SQL Server Express:

• Reporting Services

• Notification Services

• Integration Services

• Analysis Services

• Full text search

• OLAP Services / Data Mining