The company I work for has an old sql server based legacy system, it's been around for about 7 years old with a 13gb database. There are two servers, web + sql. If we were to partition the database on dates and make a copy for each year, each copy would be <2gb for that year. This would make the system faster for a smaller amount of effort than trying to performance-tune it. Also it would allow us to scale it out onto more than 1 sql server.
My question is, if we do this we won't need SQL Server Standard Edition licenses, ie Express should be ok as it's under 4GB. Are there likely to be any problems by using Express as opposed to standard?