I've had a bit of a play recently with SQLite and ADO.Net to see if I could slot in SQLite instead of MS Access in my desktop application. As yet I haven't made my mind up, but it's been a very interesting exercise. Here's a quick summary of my findings so far.
DataType Support
With my limited experience, SQLite seems to support fewer data types than MS Access. On the whole this isn't a problem apart from two areas - the .Net Decimal type and the .Net DateTime type. In both these cases I think you end up having to encode the data as strings and take care of any localisation issues yourself, e.g. making sure dates stored in France can be read in the UK and vice-versa. I haven't delved into Decimal storage too much but I think strings will need to be used instead of squeezing data into the Double data type and experiencing potential rounding errors.
Complete ADO.Net Support
The SQLite support is pretty comprehensive but misses out in one or two areas like the RowStatusUpdated event handling.
Error Handling
If you open a connection to a non-existent DB, SQLite seems to create an empty database at the specified path. This isn't a big issue but it means that the "DB doesn't exist" error turns into a "Table doesn't exist" error when you try to access a table in the DB.
Note: Since I wrote this post, I've found out that you can use connection strings to alter the default behaviour of creating an empty DB when the target DB can't be found. Read SQLite Connection Strings for more info.
Performance
On first impressions, data access with SQLite is very quick and certainly quicker than MS Access. However, if you have to start encoding and decoding data into strings (DateTime for example), I'm not sure that the performance wouldn't start to degrade.
Installation
With SQLite there is essentially nothing to install. All you need to do is copy the assembly into your application folder and you are up and running. SQLite wins hands down here.
Conclusions
None for now, except to say that SQLite looks very tempting as an Access replacement especially as it's so easy to deploy. I'll post more info as I gain more experience.
