Yesterday I came across an interesting site dedicated to Mobile Synchronisation and noticed they had a post regarding Symbian and the fact that in the next version of their OS (v9.5) they will follow Microsoft’s path of including a database engine (SQLLite fo Symbian, SQL Server CE for Windows Mobile) in ROM.
The author attempts to make the point that he doesn’t understand why you would want to include a database engine in ROM, or a runtime such as .NET CF for that matter. They point out that you “still need to install your mobile application so what is the big deal of reducing your install size by a few 100KB?”. IMHO there are a couple of compelling reasons to include both the runtime and database engine in ROM:
- Firstly it means that you don’t need to package it with your application – although the size saving isn’t that great, it is just another thing that you have to include in your installer (better that someone else deals with this).
- It also means that the database engine is only deployed once (since SQL Server CE can be deployed as a set of dlls, in theory you could have multiple applications all with their own instance of the database engine).
- I think the most significant reason for including the runtime and database engine in ROM is to make the OS more appealing to developers. If I know that all WM6 devices are going to be able to run my application because it has the runtime and db engine included then I am likely to target that device for any new applications. This is similar to the decision to include the .NET Framework v3 in Windows Vista (in contrast to previous versions of Windows where the .NET Framework is an optional install).
I was also intrigued by the author’s comment regarding the inclusion of SQL Server Express in [VS2005] a marketing ploy. Perhaps it was but developers still have the choice as to whether it gets installed (as with other components of VS) and it does mean that developers don’t need to worry about downloading/purchasing a database engine in order to build database applications.