Microsoft has released a free version of Microsoft SQL Server called “Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition”:http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/. Their hope is, in part, to compete better for mindshare with with “mySQL”:http://www.mysql.com/ and “Postgress”:http://www.postgresql.org/ among price concious developers.

It looks to be a fairly capable offering, so I was going to give it a try. Unfortunately, for some bizzare reason, Microsoft’s servers are only delivering it at 30kb/s. Since I chose the “advanced version” which comes with various extra features, that means I’ve been waiting for 40 minutes, and I’ve got another 40 minutes to go.

I could have downloaded the latest version of Postgres with bittorrent and installed it by now.