In my current project I am looking at using a DBMS to store information about multimedia objects. Typically a few hundred items will be stored, but it is possible that there could be 10s of thousands.
Are there any good DBMS applications that are cheap enough to ship with an application? I don’t to require people to have to have SQL or Oracle or Microsoft Access installed.
Take a look at SQLite. It is missing some features, so it’s not a guaranteed match, but it’s small, which is a plus.
My friend/co-worker (who is much more experienced in these things than I) likes SQLite for a project we’re looking at doing… If you use SQLite, make sure you’re aware that it supports typing in the same way that Notepad does. (ie, if you want to shove a string and a date field in an integer column, it’ll let you).
You may also want to check out MySQL (which runs this board IIRC), and postgresql, respectivly the worlds most popular and advanced open source databases, if you believe their main pages.
Berkeley DB (aka sleepycat) is a common choice for embedded databases. Bit of a learning curve for those used to SQL RDBMSes.
IBM donated the Cloudscape database (which they got when they bought Informix) to the open source community last year.
It has a 2mb footprint and is DB2 compliant.
I’ve never used it.
Thanks for all the suggestions, I’ll follow-up on all of them.
This question always confuses me. If you went with Access as a back end, why would the end user need Access installed?
I’ve written more than my fair share of projects that use Access as a back end, and none of them required having Access installed on the end user’s machine.