Sergio and the sigil

Trying to get rid of MS Access

Posted by Sergio on 2008-04-09

I have this small personal organizer application that helps me keeping track of where my hard earned money is going. There's nothing special about this application other that it was designed to be used only by myself and it works exactly the way I think it should.

This application has been a trusty companion for the last 10 years and it needs its well deserved retirement. This is the last piece of VB6 that I have installed on my system. Since I stopped installing Visual Studio 6 years ago, this means I have been dealing with a couple of known bugs. I also have not added any new feature in a long time (maybe since the year 2000).

This year I decided to finally rewrite this app in .Net and I have an interesting choice to make. The old app uses MS Access for its database and, while I know I could very well keep using Access, I just don't want to deal with Access anymore. It's a technology from the last century and I think there must be something better out there.

A few things I need the database to support:

  • I need to be able to carry the app in a thumb drive and run in any system that only has .Net installed
  • Must be in-process (no service, sorry SQL Express, mySQL)
  • Must be as much compatible with SQL-92 as possible
  • Even better if it's supported by the popular ORM tools

After a brief research I chose a few candidates that seemed convenient: SQLce (because of my familiarity with SQL Server) and SQLite (because it's everywhere, comes on the mac, trivial to install in Linux, it's the new Rails 2.0 default database).

As I'm increasingly living in a multi-platform environment, I think I'm leaning towards SQLite, but I'll welcome other suggestions that fit in the requirements.

I'll return to this topic with my findings and overall development experience with the chosen database in the near future. For now I'll leave these useful SQLite links.

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