The SQL Server database is the 'older brother' of SQL Compact. It comes in many editions itself, and provides a high performance, scalable database solution for applications that will have many users.

SQL Server is a transactional database, and this means that every operation must run in a transaction. This provides great reliability, however there is a certain overhead with using a transactional database because a simple update can involve a lot of disk operations.

Even though SQL Server performs well, WorkflowFirst itself is a NoSQL development platform, so there is also a matter of translating from the SQL language of SQL Server to the NoSQL language of WorkflowFirst.

Note: If you select SQL Server as your database, the application will automatically be licensed as if it were running on WorkflowFirst Professional. Please see the licensing section for more details.