Is there any performance difference between SQL Server Web and Express editions?

6
votes

I have a VPS with Windows Server 2008 R2, 1 GB RAM with Dual Processor Quad Core 2 CORES.

My sample application is running slower than my current website on shared hosting, when I asked the reason the says following reason:

"SQL Server Express tends to be slower compared to SQL Server Web edition. This is due to the limitations imposed in SQL Server Express which is basically meant for only development environment. We have observed significant amount of improvements with SQL Server Web edition for production web facing applications on VM's. Hence, this can be something that you might consider."

Is this logic just because they want to sale the Web edition database or there is really some performance benefit. I googled and I didn't find anything like that between different versions.

Any help on this from experts?

2
sql-serversql-server-expressvps
1 GB of RAM? Express can use up to a max of 4 GB, let alone what Server 2008 needs - you've got a hamstrung server to worry about before considering SQL Server Express performance issues... - OMG Ponies
No, the it's the DB size that's limited to 4GB - the RAM use is indeed limited to 1GB...and of course, only one processor - MartW
I am aware about 4 GB max database size. What if I upgrade to 2GB RAM. I do not have very complicated application to host on. Its simple knowledge based website with 10 K hits per day. - Sheo Narayan

2 Answers

10
votes

This is due to the limitations imposed in SQL Server Express which is basically meant for only development environment.

That is absolutely wrong.

SQL Express is used in many, many, many production environments, where it can be a great tool.

SQL Express is not throttled in terms of the number of queries per second it can process. However, as others have said in their answers here, it is limited by RAM (1GB), DB size (4GB) and CPUs (1). If your DB is between 1GB and 4GB, you could easily notice a performance difference vs. SQL Web for scenarios where everything fits into memory on one, but not on the other.

Having said that, there are a bunch of other configuration / setup / design options that can have a much larger impact; the details depend on your data, schema, access patterns, etc.