I am building an application with a SQL Server 2005 Express backend. I
would like to create a secondary instance the database on another
server that will serve as a fail-over in case the primary server goes
down (there is only the Express version of SQL Server in this picture).
I see that replication in SQL Server Express only works as a
subscriber and not a publisher. Can anyone suggest a method that I can
ensure that both instances of the database propagate data between them
when they are both available? The app is written in VB.Net.

Thx,
Marcus

Marcus,
with no log-shipping, database mirroring or replication publishing, your
choices are limited. However, log-shipping might not be available out of the
box but you could create your own scripts to perform it. You won't have sql
agent, but still could use windows scheduler to initiate your 'jobs'.
Cheers,
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
(recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)

Thanks, Paul. I did a quick search on log-shipping and came up with
this link:
http://www.sql-server-performance.com/sql_server_log_shipping.asp. The
author discusses scripts that can be run to implement log-shipping. I
guess the only difference in my situation with SQL Express is that I
cannot create "jobs" (which are run by the SQL agent which does not
exist in Express). The database I am working with is actually very
small (< 2MB) holding mostly configuration information for an
application. Therefore there are not many transactions happening, so
regular transaction log log-shipping would not be very burdensome on
the network and likely very fast, and a daily backup of the database
should be fine too. So I will need to set the Windows Scheduler up to
run these jobs. Does it seem like I have an accurate picture of what is
going on? One more thing: Do you know of a way to have SQL Express
notify an application when new data is added/updated? I suppose I could
put a trigger on every table whcih writes to another table whenever the
trigger fires, which I could then poll and see if any changes have
occurred. It would be nice not having to poll the database for changes.

Thanks,
Marcus