Often you need to make a full copy of a database, for example, if you you want to change something and see how it goes without ruining a production database. And if you happen to use SQL Server Express edition you are not so fortunate because famous Copy Database Wizard does not seem to be unavailable in  SQL Server Express Management Studio. There is a simply solution, however. It is using the backup and restore features. More...

When I was writing my introductory post about the newly released version of SQL Server or more precisely about just a CTP (Community Technology Preview) version, I complained about an apparent lack of graphical tools similar to SQL Server Management Studio or at least similar to Visual Studio Server Explorer. Such a lack made an exploration of indeed promising features of SQL Server CE 4.0 a slightly tricky task. However, as I pointed out in my previous post that shouldn’t  actually prevent programmers from playing with this database, because in spite of non-existence of GUI tools there was already an API released, thus it was possible to interact with the database system by just issuing SQL statements from C# or any other .NET language.

However, I was wrong in my statement about a lack of GUI tools, in fact they do exists. More...

• What SQL Server CE 4.0 means for ASP.NET developers
• Where to get and how to install
• How do I create my tables?!!

When I came across a story on the newest version of SQL Server CE by Scott Guthrie, as well as a blog post in the SQL Server CE team blog, I was amazed that it was possible to run on a web server for ASP.NET application in the Medium Trust mode without any installation. This literally means that finally one can use SQL for storing data even though their hosting plan, for example, doesn’t allow having a SQL Server database. More...

In the previous part of the tutorial we learnt how to use SQL Server Compact Edition in our application. In this part we are going to learn how to synchronize the data between Compact Edition and a regular verson of SQL Server.

Visual Studio 2008 has built-in Synchronization Services that we’ll be using in our project. More...

Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition is an embeded database that allows you to integrate it in your destkop and mobile applications. It can be used in a variety of scenarios, just some examples:

• a single-user application that still stores its data in the SQL database
• a local cache of a remote SQL Server database,
• a mobile application that synchronizes its local compact database with a remote database from time to time.

SQL Server Compact Edition takes about 1.5 MB on HDD and consumes about 5 MB of RAM. It’s free to use and free to distribute with your application. More...