Database Engine
A&B Express Products, LLC. software is designed for the Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE) and Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 or greater. Smaller companies can use the MSDE (up to 5 users) which is a scaled down version of SQL. Larger companies will require the complete SQL program.
The following information about SQL is provided by Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft® SQL Server™ is designed to be a client/server system. Client/server systems are constructed so that the database can reside on a central computer, known as a server, and be shared among several users. When users want to access the data in SQL Server, they run an application on their local computer, known as a client, that connects over a network to the server running SQL Server.
In large client/server systems, thousands of users may be connected to a SQL Server at the same time. SQL Server has full protection for these environments, with safeguards that prevent problems such as having multiple users trying to update the same piece of data at the same time. SQL Server also effectively allocates the available resources, such as memory, network bandwidth, and disk I/O, among the multiple users.
While SQL Server works very effectively as a server, it can also be used in applications that need a stand-alone database stored locally on the client. SQL Server can dynamically configure itself to run efficiently with the resources available on a client without the need to dedicate a database administrator to each client.
SQL Server applications can run on the same computer as SQL Server. The application connects to SQL Server using Windows Inter-process Communications components (IPC), such as shared memory, instead of a network. This lets SQL Server be used on small systems where an application needs to store its data locally.