SQL Server 2008 R2 - Web Edition VS. Standard

I need to choose a SQL Server 2008 R2 edition for a project but I开发者_开发技巧 don't know what edition suits best. Website should have 2M impressions/100K unique users each month. DB of the site is very compact and takes 50MB top. Most of the queries are SELECTs with some complicated joins, but no UPDATE/DELETE/INSERT.

I think the web edition should do the work, however I'm afraid it's not upgradeable or won't be able to handle the load. What would you recommend?

Have you considered using SQL Server Express? All of your data is going to fit in memory and since it is read-only you're not going to have much issues with lock contention, so even being limited to one CPU may not be so bad.

Also, given that it sounds like you're not at the 2M impression scale yet, why not start with the free, yet fully capable, option until time comes when you really need a more powerful option (just be sure to monitor, plan, and budget accordingly!).

Doing load testing and running simulations can help guide your decision. Tune your queries and indexes as part of this - a finely tuned SQL Express instance can easily outperform a poorly implemented system running in the any of the other editions.

Hard to tell without hard numbers to calculate out options and/or actual load tests, but I suspect web will do you good enough for now. In either case, it is not a tricky decision to undo if the scale does not work -- your codebase won't care.

Scale-wise, 4 processors and max memory is alot of room to go, especialy if your data is only 50mb. You could run that in a RAM drive without breaking a sweat, and that would make things insanely fast.