This is the big daddy of the Microsoft Databases and forms the optimum platform for most commercial web applications. Although the full product is expensive a Developer Licence can be purchased at a reasonable cost of about £50. The developer version contains all of the features of the full product but can only be used in the development environment. This version is not suitable for your production web server.
The benefits of SQL Server over Access are massive and despite the initial learning curve which may need to be high (this is likely to be a new product) once you understand the concepts then the benefits will rapidly become apparent.
SQL Server supports stored procedures which are written and run on the database. Stored procedures act as an intermediate layer which passes data to and from the database and other applications which need access to the database. Updates can be made to the stored procedures to alter the information exchanged that will require no changes on the web application.
To provide a simple example, let’s say we have a stored procedure that returns a set of data that includes surnames and sorts them in ascending order ready to be displayed on a web page. The web application has code to extract the results from the stored procedure and display them on the web page. Should we decide that the information is required in descending order than this can be achieved with a simple change in the stored procedure and would not require changes to the web application. Although you are unlikely in practice to use a stored procedure in this way I hope this explains the principals involved.
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