standalone database

Question

I'm currently designing a small application in .Net and in the past I've been using MSAccess as standalone database that I can ship with the program. But I was wondering if in this day and age there wasn't alternative solutions, as easy to integrate in a .Net app., as transparent for the user and maybe better performance with large amount of data?

Answer 1

Your options are:

• Sqlite
• Firebird
• Sql Server CE - depricated, latest version, 4.0 SP1 was released 8/31/2012
• VistaDB - commercial
• ESE - Which is hard to integrate with .Net

SQL CE and Firebird are a lot faster when you need multithreaded writes, sqlite is king for single threaded access, or multithreaded reads. VistaDb is 100% managed so you can ship it on embedded devices.

These DBs in general will give you better reliability and performance to access. I would strongly recommend against using any of these dbs over a network share.

Answer 2

SQLite! This is exactly what it was made for.

http://www.sqlite.org/

http://sqlite.phxsoftware.com/