Managed ESENT v1 released – Managed/.Net access to the free embedded database (“Extensible Storage Engine/ESE”) that ships with Windows

ESE/ESENT Database Stuff - Managed interface to Esent released

“I just published the first release of the Esent .NET managed interface on Codeplex.

http://www.codeplex.com/ManagedEsent

This is an interop layer can be used to write managed applications that use esent. There is a straightforward translation of the unmanaged API and some helper methods/objects built on top of those methods. …

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CodePlex - ESENT Managed Interface

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ESENT is an embeddable database storage engine (ISAM) which is part of Windows. It provides reliable, transacted, concurrent, high-performance data storage with row-level locking, write-ahead logging and snapshot isolation. This is a managed wrapper for the ESENT Win32 API.

Version 1.0 of the ESENT Managed Interop has been released

ESENT is an embedded database storage engine (ISAM) which is part of Windows (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684493(VS.85).aspx) It provides reliable, transacted, concurrent and high-performance data storage. It can be used for small databases (a few MB) or huge datasets (hundreds of GB). The engine provides logging, recovery, transactions and concurrent access with row-level locking and snapshot isolation.

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The Microsoft.Isam.Esent.Interop namespace provides managed access to ESENT and will be developed with these principles:

• Any program written with this Api should work with the ESENT.dll from either Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008.
• A comprehensive test suite for all the interop code.
• The Esent.Interop DLL should only require version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.
• Full and complete documentation. Intellisense should be able to provide useful and extensive help.

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If you’re ESE’ing or thinking about it then this project, with its recent release, will help.

Why am I interest in this? A couple reasons.

In relation to work, where I do Electronic Data Discovery, I may one day get one of these databases from an image and be asked to transform it into a “discoverable” form.

On the home front, I think its kind of cool and given there’s no distribution/includes/bin’s/third parties/etc it is something I might want to check out in more detail. Yes, some of the other embedded database solutions might be “better”, but sometimes you just need quick and easy and already in the box… ;)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Did you know Windows (since Windows Server 2000) comes with a transactional database engine already baked into the OS, which you can use in your applications today, no download required?