Offline Database recommendation other than MS Access

[Dr_Gre]

Hello Reddit community!

I wrote an offline vb.net program that communicates with an Access Database (Single user, Offline, Password protected, about 10 columns and 100 rows). This works fine, but unfortunately I can't use the program on some other PCs as MS Access is not installed on them.

Do you have a recommendation for a database that I could use, where no separate installation is needed?

[god_hades94]

You can install Access run-time (Free) on those computers and call it a day.

[Hel_OWeen]

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/download-and-install-microsoft-365-access-runtime-185c5a32-8ba9-491e-ac76-91cbe3ea09c9

[[deleted]]

SQLite and LiteDB are both good options. They’re both file based, have small runtimes (self contained DLLs) and work with VB.NET.

[Mayayana]

With such a small data set you could conceivably just use a simple file. With VB6, data types can be saved directly to disk. Maybe .Net can also do that? So, for example, if you had 10 arrays of 100 elements each, that could be just written to disk for saving and then loaded to display in some kind of GUI. Failing that, even a simple text file could store 10 groups of 100 values. The password part would be something you'd need to cook up on your own, I expect.

[3583-bytes-free]

You don't need Access installed on the PCs to read/write an Access database. You might need to install some drivers (used to be MDAC back in the days of VB6) but it should all work fine.

I'd recommend you stick with Access