Can I install SQL Server on Windows 98?

By Bill Graziano on 29 July 2000 | Tags: Installation

Chris writes "Hi, Thank for this helpful site but I can't understand anything on here. This is not your crime :P Just I don't know anything else about SQL Server. How can I install SQL Server and Oracle on my machine? My machine (at home) 's operating system is Windows 98. Is this enough? More..I'm developing ASP pages. Has advantage for my ASP pages? Thank you."

Well Chris, I can certainly cover the SQL Server side of your question. As far as Oracle, I'm not going to be much help. Sorry :( Maybe one of our sharp-eyed readers can post a comment with a link to a good Oracle site.

SQL Server does run on Windows 98. In the installation program you can install the Desktop edition. It is almost identical of the Standard edition which is installed on servers. The desktop edition also includes special code to minimize the amount of memory it uses. It does not support OLAP Services or full text indexing. I also would not use SQL Server on Windows 98 for any type of high throughput database. It does work just fine as a development workstation though.

Concerning your second question, SQL Server can provide a number of advantages for ASP developers. Those advantages come with added complexity though. It is much easier to learn Access and deploy a solution using Access than with SQL Server. That is the main benefit of Access: ease of use. SQL Server gives you better scalability and reliability. While Access might support tens of users at a time, SQL Server is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands. It is also less likely to have data corruption errors. You can perform backups while the database is running with almost no loss in performance.

In most hosted environments, the SQL Server machine is separate from the web server. That means that database queries are passed to a separate computer that is only handling database queries and is optimized for them. This leaves your web server free to focus on web serving. I hope this helps.