I’ve been preparing to deliver a presentation on SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 (SP1 – recently released) and I was wondering if anyone had designed (or contemplated designing) a system with SQL Server CE 3.5 (or earlier versions)?
In particular, has anyone thought of (or experienced) using SQLCE as a solution for offline data storage (as part of a connected system design)?
Version 3.5 looks to be pretty feature rich compared to its predecessors, is it ready for serious consideration (now that it supports LINQ to SQL, identity columns and an assortment of important T-SQL)?
Would you consider using it if you had the need for a lightweight low-footprint file based database (especially if it needed to be supported on mobile devices and desktop systems), or are there better options?
At work, we recently had to migrate a project that was designed for SQL Server Express to SQLCE. At first I thought it was going to be awful, mainly due to the fact that there are no stored procedures. Once we started digging into it though, and saw what it DOES offer, we were convinced it was the right move. It supports LINQ, querying alot of data took MUCH quicker than we thought it would. Inserting and Updating were a little slower, but really not too bad at all. The only problems we ran into really were A) Management Studio 2005 doesn’t support it, and although 2008 does, it’s very limited. Not sure why, hopefully they’ll change that for future releases, but it bugged the hell outta me. B) When trying to migrate an existing SQL Server DB to a SQLCE, there’s really no easy way to create the schema from the existing one, and to move all the data. You’ll probably have to roll your own tool to do that (we had to).
All that being said though, the end result was amazing. The install time was cut down to a third now that users didn’t have to install SQL Express, and the application ran much smoother on machines with less memory. All in all, I was amazed at how well it actually works.