Concerns regarding multiple instances

Question

Hi,
I need some advice while I am still in the "info gathering" stage.
We have a product running on Windows Embedded and I recently successfully ran some tests with SQLCE.
Our current application uses flatfiles for data storage. There are various "irrelevant" groups of data, like machine counters (the most critical), config, button mappings, network settings etc.
So far, our field technicians used simple copy/paste routines to transfer configs and such. With SQLCE this routine would be impossible, unless if each of these groups had it's own .sdf file and instance.
The other solution is to prepare table specific sql import/export routines. For the moment I don't see any simple way of doing this.
So I kind of like the first solution (multiple .sdf), but what are the cons of doing such? We are somewhat HW restricted with the CPU being Atom 270 (Intel Little Falls) and the application is already resource intensive.

Answer 1

Which version of SQL CE are you using - 3.1 and later runs on the desktop, so you could write a desktop utility to configure the device specific data.

I would not recommend more SDF file = more connections, as each connection consumes memory.

---

http://erikej.blogspot.com Erik Ejlskov Jensen - Please mark as answer, if this was it.

Answer 2

Hi Erik,
I have SQLCE 3.5 SP2 Beta 2 running on the target machine.
I further investigated our current setup and found out that two of the logs can be up to 200MB each. Maybe we should keep those out of SQL and for the time being, leave them as they are. Then, possibly, the rest of the stuff will be below 10MB, which makes it really portable and thus makes problem solving for remote clients much easier.
On wikipedia, it is noted:

SQL CE runs in-process with the application which is hosting it; while having a memory footprint of less than 2 MB; however, all SQL CE instances share the same memory pool.

Anyway, would this same memory pool be a good thing for me, or anyone else with similar requirements, or not? :)

Answer 3

This means, that all applications on the same machine will use a shared memory pool for SQL CE. Additional connections to several different files will still consume memory.

---

http://erikej.blogspot.com Erik Ejlskov Jensen - Please mark as answer, if this was it.

Answer 4

Thank you Erik for clearing that up!
I'll tag your first post as an answer to "clear" the ? out of the topic title.
Any further elaboration would still be highly appriciated, though.