You know I'm in the "dedicate DCs as DCs only" camp, so I would prefer to consider a virtual SQL Express server running under the DC as the host. With Windows licenses now allowing you to run 1 or ...

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition will replace Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine as the software maker's lightweight database offering of choice.

Don't need an enterprise-grade database on the cloud? Microsoft offers Azure customers a low-cost, lightweight SQL server option for testing and purposes and apps.

I have a test server hosting several sites using SQL Server Express and SQL Management Studio Express. I've seen one site have an occasional issue where queries to a particular table (the ...