SQL Srv 2005 Express Platform Limitations Questions

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Tom C. - 28 Jul 2008 16:23 GMT

I understand that Express is limited to use only 1 CPU even though it
installs on multi-CPU platforms. My question is about memory, which is
limited to 1GB. Will Express install on a hardware platform that has in
excess of 1GB and then only use 1GB as it does similarly with CPUs, or will
it just NOT install at all if the platform check finds more than 1GB?

Next question is about the database size limit of 4GB. How is this measure?
Is this the size of the MDF file itself, or what? Are there tools or a
handly t-sql script that I can run to monitor how close Express is to this
capacity limit? Thanks for any pointers.

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Aaron Bertrand [SQL Server MVP] - 28 Jul 2008 16:29 GMT

> limited to 1GB. Will Express install on a hardware platform that has in
> excess of 1GB and then only use 1GB as it does similarly with CPUs,

Yes.

> Next question is about the database size limit of 4GB. How is this measure?
> Is this the size of the MDF file itself, or what?

Yes I am pretty sure it measures just the size of the data file(s) for each
database.

> Are there tools or a
> handly t-sql script that I can run to monitor how close Express is to this
> capacity limit?

EXEC sp_spaceused
?

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Tom C. - 29 Jul 2008 16:27 GMT

Thanks for the input. It appears that sp_spaceused returns the rounded size
of the MDF file itself. And you can combine the following t-sql to find out
your edition, and if it's Express, you can see how close the system is to
capacity, in case you want to warn your users:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('edition') as EDITION
exec sp_spaceused

Thanks again for the help.

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