DavidM

The marketing has cranked up a gear, which would seem to indicate they are getting a good response from the betas.

Looking here (features) and here (pricing), we see 4 commercial breeds of SQL Server 2005.

I have to say that the Express addition is my show stealer here.  1GB RAM, 4GB database size, GUI interface, no query governor.  That much grunt for “free” is outstanding.  A well built app and a good db design, I honestly think this little animal could handle a large portion of the average small business data demands for both web and internal use. Small business is a relative term, but you get my drift... I haven't read the EULA for Express so you might not be able to use it that way...

I am disappointed with the Standard edition on only one point.  Online indexing (lack of). There are lots of web interfaces driven from the Standard edition and one of the biggest issues is with locking during maintenance.  Without that, the advantage over “Workgroup” looks a little weaker from the OLTP point of view. 

I'd give 10 to 1 that most DBAs would swap CLR integration for Online indexing in a heart beat. Any takers?

Good points include programmability and security enhancements are in all editions and integrated replication with Oracle for the big end of town. 

Unbelievably, “Parallel Data Modeling” is available in the Enterprise edition.  If you don't know what that is, join the queue.  I think what they are trying to say is that somewhere inside the code of SQL Server, Dr Codd lives and is formulating multiple data models simultaneously due to the multi-dimensional nature of heaven and its interaction with C++.