MSDE is a good alternative for a backend when creating your .NET data driven applicaiton. The great thing about MSDE is that it uses the same engine as SQL Server 2000, and more importantly...it's free! So if MSDE is free, there must be a catch, right? Well for one, MSDE doesn't provide any IDE to interact with it, so you have the option of OSQL at the command line, or a free adminstrator tool. Beside the lack of IDE for MSDE, it implements something known as the workload governor.
Workload Governor
The workload governor is used by MSDE to limit the performance of your application, when it exceeds eight concurrent operations. Once the database passes this limit, the workload governor is activated, which will affect the performance of your application by stalling user connections for a few milliseconds.
If you would like further information, be sure to check out the article on The SQL Server 2000 Workload Governor. It's an interesting look into the limitations, and really helped me understand the differences between MSDE and SQL Server 2000.
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