Brave Tech World

October 23, 2006

    SQL Server 2000 Standard version has a limitation of 4GB for the database size. This was a strategy from Microsoft so big companies would always buy the Enterprise version with unlimited database size.

    Turns out that even small companies can have way more than 4GB of structured data nowadays. Imagine that you import 100% of your websites logs into SQL. An average small business getting about 10K page views per day, would reach the 4GB boundary in about a year.

    On my case, I'm building a Geo database with geographical names and locations. That is about 5-6 million rows. With indexes and name variations the entire database is about 3GB. During the weekend I hit the bottleneck a couple of times while trying to optimize the database, so I had to be extra creative to prevent that from happening.

   That made me look into the alternatives. The two obvious options were to upgrade to SQL 2005 or to go with MySQL. I couldn't find info on MySQL about its limit, so I assume it is unlimited. Now for SQL 2005, suprise surprise, it is also unlimited in the Standard version.

    Microsoft should release a patch for SQL 2000 that removes the 4 GB limit. This is better than having companies evaluation the competition because they need to migrate to something else.

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