MSDE Licensing

The MSDE licence says that it can be used for up to 5 concurrent users. My app is an ASP.NET app, so won't I just be using one user - the ASP.NET account? I'm wondering whether we can get away with just buying a new server and sticking MSDE on it rather than shelling out for another £5000 SQL server licence...I do not believe what you say (5 concurrent users) is correct.

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/msde/howtobuy/msdeuse.asp.

From this page:

Q. Can I use MSDE as a database for Web applications?

A. Yes, MSDE is an ideal solution for basic Web applications with up to 25 concurrent users.

There is throttling of performance with 8 concurrent OPERATIONS (but three are normally used internally).

Fromthis page:

The Microsoft® SQL Server? 2000 workload governor is designed to limit the performance of an instance of the database engine any time more than eight operations are active at the same time. An instance of the SQL Server 2000 database engine is one copy of the database software that operates as an operating system service.

The operations counted by the workload governor are:

Processing a request to open an inbound connection and login.

Processing a batch of one or more Transact-SQL statements received over an inbound connection.

Processing a distributed transaction operation, such as a prepare-to-commit or rollback operation.

Processing a request to log off and close an inbound connection.

Periodic system-generated operations such as shrinking a database if the database has the AUTO_SHRINK option turned on, completing the deletion of rows from the base level of indexes, or populating the SQL Server performance counters in the System Monitor.

Instances of SQL Server 2000 Personal Edition will also periodically generate system operations to process any full-text indexes referenced by the databases managed by the instance. SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000) does not support full-text indexes.|||Sorry - missed a "2" out there.... Thats answered the question great - thanks a lot!