I'm seeing it pop up more and more and not really understanding the purpose of it? Can I only use it when I am developing locally on my desktop?
Or can I put a commercial site on a server with say Win2003 thats using VistaDB? Is it faster than using a SQL DB? Is it secure?
Confused...
VistaDB is a .NET alternative to the lightweight database systems offered by Microsoft: Jet (Microsoft Access), MSDE, Sql Server CE or Sql Server Express. You can use it in any .NET application where you need a database and you don't really want the overhead of having a client/server database.
VistaDB is an embedded database (some other embedded databases are SQLite and FireBird). This basically means that your database is totally "invisible" to your end users. They don't need to install a client/server database like SQL Server for instance. Deploying VistaDB is simple. All you need is the database file and a reference to the VistaDB runtime DLL within your application.
A commercial application that uses VistaDB for it's backend is Graffiti CMS.