SQLite, Firebird or SQL compact

Hi All,
I'm trying to replace an existing applications use of text and excel files for data storage with an embedded database model. I've narrowed it down to 3: Sqlite, Firebird, and Microsofts SQL Compact.
For simplicity i like sqlite, but i'd like some thread safety, and concurrency.
My biggest hang up in trying to finalize my decision, is that in the future i'll want to query another database (i.e query a customer's remote database to retrieve employee passwords) or allow another database to insert or query my tables to retrieve operational data. My google-fu is strong, but I have yet to see examples or read documentation that specifically mentions whether this is possible. What's the correct terminology? I've seen discussions about linked databases (pros and cons), as well as cross database queries, but never a definitive "Yes, i did this... and it worked". It could be so commonly done that noone mentions it, and i'm just retarded. :-/
If i adopt Firebird, will a customer with SQL Server just be able to use an odbc connection to interact with my database? It's got to be a simple thing, i'm just missing it.
Please help me put this monkey to rest.

NI has a design pattern solution for SQLLite that even works on their CompactRIO RT controller hardware to use SQLLite from within LabVIEW. And http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/ shows an ODBC driver for SQLLite. There are of course problems since the ODC driver contains the actual SQLLite engine and accesses the database file. So remote access through ODBC seems not trivial, though you could of course share the database file over the network and access it through an ODBC driver installed on a different computer. This probably still leaves the difficulty how to deal with concurrent access to the database file if your client tries to query the database file at the same time as your application has it open to write or query data from it.
Firebird also has an ODBC driver: http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=files&id=odbc. Firebird seems to either have a filebased access model that does allow concurrent access to the same database as well as a so called super server mode, where a service process controls access to the database file(s) and access is done through network communication to this service process. Not sure if the ODBC driver supports the super server mode transparently but if it does this would be a very easy solution to have your application use the database to store date and allow your clients to query the database from other computers directly.
Microsoft SQL Compact I'm not sure. If this is what was before the SQL Server Desktop Edition, then it is basically a full featured SQL Server installation with the database size limitation to 2GB. This would certainly work also with remote access through ODBC and/or ADO .Net. But if you have ODBC drivers for your database you can basically access it through ADO ActiveX or ADO .Net as well and it doesn't even have to be slower if the driver and interface are done well.
Message Edited by rolfk on 03-23-2010 09:15 AM
Rolf Kalbermatter
CIT Engineering Netherlands
a division of Test & Measurement Solutions

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Hi,
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Contact SQL Server:http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?category=sqlserver
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TechNet Community Support

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Post Author: AllenF
CA Forum: General
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Post Author: AllenF
CA Forum: General
I'm using CR10 that ships with Visual Studio 2008. I want to upgrade several reasonably complicated reports to use SQL Server Compact 3.5 data. The reports are currently using Access 2000 data. Is there a simple way to go about this? I REALLY don't want to have to recreate these reports.

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created:
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Please mark as answer, if this was it. Visit my SQL Server Compact blog http://erikej.blogspot.com

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Message Edited by Matthew Kelton on 07-23-2009 09:12 AM

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Olaf Helper
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Matt Small - Microsoft Escalation Engineer - Forum Moderator
If my reply answers your question, please mark this post as answered.
NOTE: If I ask for code, please provide something that I can drop directly into a project and run (including XAML), or an actual application project. I'm trying to help a lot of people, so I don't have time to figure out weird snippets with undefined
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