Here are some "free" SQL Databases in the market:

• MySQL is about 30MB to download.

• Microsoft MSDE (crippled) is about 40MB.

• IBM Cloudscape (IBM bought it from Informix for $85 million in 1999 - and then put in to public domain) is 60MB.

• CA Ingres (once owned by ASK, the one time popular Ingres was bought by CA for $310million in 1994) is a whopping 100MB.

All these are good database software - but I think they all suffered from "too many old baggage to lug around" syndrome. they have old features that cannot be removed due to the user base and therefore they keep getting bigger.

Take CA Ingres for instant, it took me a while to download. After that I tried to make some sense out of it - it took about 10 mins to complete the setup and other 2 hours to configure and setup my test db - then I try create some web page to access the db.... I gave up after half a day! Way too complex for my liking. By the way, I used to work on Ingres (DEC VAX) when I was doing a lot of work for my old oil exploration client in the late 80s.

Therefore, I concluded that for what most people, installing these program and getting it to work is like what some say "trying to kill the fly that have just landed on horse head with a shotgun! the horse died and the fly flies away".

Then I came across SQLite. New to me, but apparently been around for awhile. It is currently in its version 3 variant. SQLite is a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine. An important feature is that all transactions are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID) even after system crashes and power failures. I really like its small code footprint: less than 30K lines of C code, less than 250KB code space.

Updated On: 07.01.03