Because of the cost and portability, I had a tendency to use Microsoft Access databases as the back-end for many of my web sites.  Microsoft recently released Visual Studio 2005 which includes SQL Express 2005.  SQL Express is designed to be used in-place of Access for low volume web sites.

With this in-mind, my first thought was, “How to I upsize my Access 2000 databases to SQL Express 2005?”  It’s surprisingly easy.

How to Upsize an Access 2000 Database to an SQL Express 2005 Database

3. Select Create new database and then Next >

4. This is probably the hardest part.  The instance of your SQL Express database won’t show-up in the database dropdown list.   For the name of your SQL Server, enter MACHINENAME\SQLExpress or .\SQLExpress.  The former worked for me:



5. Make sure you name the database, click Next >, and the rest is the same as it’s always been.

If you find that Access can’t connect to the SQL Express database, this FAQ might be helpful:

FAQ: How to connect to SQL Express from "downlevel clients"(Access 2003, VS 2003, VB 6, etc(basically anything that is not using .Net 2.0 or the new SQL Native Client))

You’ll also likely want to bookmark the Microsoft SQL Express Blog to stay informed.