Had it not been for the MSDE workload governor, we might have shipped a super duper unoptimized version of our Cisco netmanager tool, which stressed the disk, stressed the cpu and created an artificial bottleneck in sql server.

The restrictions that workload governor imposed on us, strove us to better the design and optimize the process as much was required and we have finally managed to beat the workload governor.(Shall say how in the next installment)

Had this workload governor issue, never come under our radar, we would have gone forward and deployed the unoptimized version and encountered the issues with our design, much later into the product cycle, by which time the code is more entrenched and harder to root out.

I should say that for any future SQL server product, that i encounter, MSDE would be made the preffered initial platform and only by reaching an acceptable level of performance using this little server, would i want to use the full version, and that too only if the product requires that amount of performance.

From a product management point of view , this saves around 1000$ on the product cost at the very minimum depending on your scale of resource consumption. But the real savings will be achieved when you take the same system and try to make it big aka scale.

When you try to scale an in-efficient system, you would also scale your inefficiencies for free along with it. So instead of say, necessitating a 1000$ SQL-server workgroup edition running on a 4000$ hardware, you might have to go for two such servers running on much bigger systems with more tweakings on the DB end (partitioned tables, disk arrays), requiring a complex installation, which again has to be coded and documented, and perhaps require a DBA to handle all this. Talk about expense !!!! It would take a long time to convert the poor end user, even if there are no other comparable alternatives in the market.

I wish there were comparable restrictions in place for all our tools, so that we could try and get under them and better ourselves in the process.