Any Movement on the 4 gig limit?

We're very interested in having our application use SQL/e but we can't have the 4 gig limit. It makes sense to me that SQL/e simply should not be able to access a file over the network, and then you wouldn't have any reason to put a 4 gig limit on it.

At that point it becomes a very flexible alternative for remote users that need to have a large amount of data (i.e. documents, images etc.) with them.

We'd love to start building an abstraction layer so that we can support both SQL Server and SQL/e so that we can support network and remote users and not have the nightmare that is SQL Server Express installation. (care of the windows installer group's bugs...)

Thanks! Hoping for a favourable answer!

The limit is one of the restrictions on having a free db engine, you might want to look at the workgroup edition of SQL Server 2005. The other option is to have muiltiple database files as the limit is on the size of the database files not the combined engine. You could store archived information in files and keep the production/live data in the current file.

|||Ya, but the point to the whole deal is that the 4 gig limit is not applicable in the case of a single user database scenario like SQL/e because it's specifically there to prevent people from using SSE to share the database and not buy SQL Server.

With SQL Server 2000 we had the personal edition which was $99. That was fine and dandy and I could live with that on client machines. However, that's gone for SQL Server 2005 and as a result it gets incredibly expensive to outfit laptops with a database engine that doesn't have a 4 gig limit.

SQL/e is the perfect way to distribute your application in a smart client (online/offline) environment because it's drag and drop installable instead of the disaster that is SSE installation. And because it's designed for a single user scenario there should be no reason for the 4 gig limit. They should just prevent the APIs from connecting to a datasource on a network device. Problem solved and you get a great little database for distributed applications.

And since this is exactly the scenario that the product was designed for it just makes sense to not have a limit and lock it down.