Yearning for Yukon

Let me say that the Express version of SQL 2005 has not been a disappointment to me.

The disappointment has been in not getting a new beta of the ‘real thing’, the ‘Venti espresso’, the ‘yellow yolk of the Yukon egg’.

I have not tried to do much with SQL Express. As soon as I heard the product mentioned in the same sentence as MSDE, I pictured it appearing in the Server Explorer window of the IDE, doing all the mundane things databases have done for the last 5 years. I think a previous forced experience in wrestling with MSDE helped me figure out some of the quirks, like hunting down the instance name to make a connection [use (local)\SQLEXPRESS].

I did come across an interesting error message. I was curious to see if SQL Express, like MSDE, defaults to Windows Authentication only (and it does). In toying around, I tried to “sp_addlogin ‘user’, ‘user’” (just as a test, you see, to set the password the same as the username), and had the following thrown back at me:

 
Password validation failed. The password does not meet policy
requirements because it is not complex enough. 

Interesting.

Also interesting: I came across a SQL Express rant and a MySql success story in back to back posts this evening. I hope something gets released before the trend continues.

UPDATE: One more SQL Express rant, and a SQL Express success.