On-Disk database storage, best practices

Question

If this question seems common to you, I apologise, I did a quick search around this site and a few google searches and could not find a satisfying answer.

My question is this;

I have only been a software developer for 3-4 years now. This may seem like a time long enough to answer this question myself however in all my time, I have never had to develop software where the main body of data-storage is not required to be in an on-line database. This time however, my latest development requires only for its data to be stored only to disk.

The actual data itself is light-weight. In-code the main asset will be a class with only a few, string based properties on it which must be persisted. My initial thoughts are on simple serialisation. On application close new assets are simply serialised and stored on disk as a file. I also though maybe for backup purposes (or if it is somehow a better option to a serialised class) an XML file would be appropriate.

I cannot think of any distinct disadvantages of either of these approaches, it is this fact which causes me to ask this question publicly. In my experience, there is rarely a solution to a problem which does not have it's downsides.

Answer 1

Serialization (binary or XML) is appropriate for a small amount of data. The problem with this approach is when you get large amounts of data (that you may need to query).

If you are on a windows platform and in need of a proper database, you can use the embedded database engine that comes with windows - ESENT. It is the backing store of Exchange and RavenDB.

Here are the .NET wrapper libraries for it.

ManagedEsent provides managed access to ESENT, the embeddable database engine native to Windows. ManagedEsent uses the esent.dll that is part of Microsoft Windows so there are no extra unmanaged binaries to download and install.