Microsoft SQL Express offers so much when evaluating a persistence store for your own applications, especially if you are targeting Windows and utilising the .Net framework. SQL Express offers pretty much most of the common features available in the full blown SQL Server which makes development and switching between SQL Server and SQL Express pretty seamless. However, there is one major factor which I would reccomend you consider… Deployment. You would expect the deployment of SQL Express to be as easy as installing say the .