Hey guys,

I have a doubt regarding installing application developed in Visual Studio 2005 using C# and SQL Server 2005 as back end. My doubt is this.
My development machine has SQL Server 2005 installed and the application is working properly. When I deploy and install this application on the client's machine I can install the .NET framework 2.0 for the application to work properly. But how about the database. Do I have to ask my client to buy SQL Server to run the application or are there any components available that allows my application to access SQL Server 2005 .mdf database without having to install SQL Server 2005 on client machine. Hope you understand my question. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a ton.

Look up SQL Express 2005. It is very likely that you are running this instead of the full MS SQL Server on your development machine. It is a distributable component provided by Microsoft and is compatible with the full version MS SQL server database files. The only limitation that it has is that the database cannot be bigger than 2GB. Anything more than that would require a full version MS SQL server.

Hi, thanks but I am not running the express edition. I have separately installed the full SQL Server database. So again, wat if my databases exceed 2gb in size. Is there not any workaround except for purchasing SQL Server for client.

There's no work around the 2GB limit, you get what you pay for. Depending on how your program works, the database may never reach the 2GB limit. Even if it does, you can just reuse the mdf file with the new MS SQL Server easily.

Just go for MySQL which is free. problem is how to migrate existing structure of MS SQL-> MySQl is 2 difficult.

Unless you want to opensource your software, it is not free. You will need to pay mysql for the database connectors if you don't want your software to be gpl compliant.