Sound Off: Local Databases
We're going to be looking at some a product category in the near future that we haven't tackled before: databases for local storage -- databases embedded in an application.
I want to look at least two products in this area but I'm open to your suggestions as to what those products should be (currently I'm leaning towards Sybase and VistaDB but I could be persuaded to look at different products). I'm not interested in support for real "embedded" applications in hardware or mobile devices, nor am I interested in those super-fast databases that get their speed from holding everything in memory. The scenario that I want to go after is business applications that need local storage to handle off-line activities, or to provide users with their own dedicated storage, or to improve performance by eliminating network trips, and that need to persist their data even if the computer is shut down.
So the criteria that I'll be testing the databases against are that they have a small footprint, are easy to deploy, are unlikely to fail, require zero administration, integrate well with Visual Studio, are dead easy to use, add no drag on application performance, and have as many RDBMS-like features for business applications as you is possible within those constraints.
Who do you want to see reviewed? What are you using? Or do we need to review these products at all? Are Jet and SQL Server Express all that any .NET developer needs?
Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/22/2010