Although an enterprise geodatabase requires you to invest in the management and administration, the benefits can be highly rewarding. Enterprise geodatabases are built on top of relational database management systems such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2. These systems are powerful and are wired to sustain constant editing and multiple accesses. With enterprise geodatabases, you can do the following tasks:
Set up access control
Build a centralized geodatabase which can be accessed from multiple terminals
Restrict certain users from viewing a feature class or table
Restrict certain users from editing a feature class or table
Restrict users from changing the geodatabase schema
Edit tracking to know who added a new feature or edited an existing one
In the next section, we will start with the installation of Microsoft SQL Server Express 2012 Service Pack 1.