Advice on a DB that can be uploaded to a website by a smart client for collecting survey feedback

Question

Hello,

I'm hoping you can help.

I'm looking for a zero config multi-user datbase that my winforms application can easily upload to a webserver folder (together with 1 or 2 classic asp pages) and am looking for some suggestions/recommendations.

The idea is that the database will be used to collect feedback entered by people filling in the asp pages. The pages will write to the database using javascript.

The database will subsequently be downloaded again for processing once the responses are in.

In Summary:

It will mostly run in MS Windows environments.

I have a modest budget for this and do not mind paying for such a database.

No runtime licensing costs.

Should be xcopy - Once uploaded to a website folder it should be operational.

It should not have a dotnet CLR dependency.

It should support a resonable level of concurrent access. Average respondent count would be around 20-30 but one never knows.

Should be a reasonable size so that uploads/downloads to and from the site will be reasonably fast.

Would appreciate your suggestions/comments

Many thanks

Abz

To clarify - this is a desktop commercial application for feedback management in a vertical market. It uses SQL Server as the backing store.

The application currently provides feedback management from email and paper feedback. I now want to add web feedback capability. Getting users to to make their SQL servers accessible to a website is not at option at this time as I am want to make getting up and running as painless as possible.

I intend to release a web based implementation of the software in the near future but for now am looking at the above as a pragmatic way to provide web based feedback collection.

Answer 1

SQLite comes to mind. It meets all of your stated requirements, is open source, and has a liberal license (public domain).

http://sqlite.org/

Answer 2

why reinvent the wheel ? If you want to collect feedback and stuffs from users of your app and if they are connected to internet, it might be a better idea - and in the long term cheaper - to use a service like wufoo. We recently switched from homegrown setup to wufoo and are very pleased. Check it out.

Otherwise you might want to take a look at sqlite orfirebird. Both of them are very robust, and have ADO.NET providers. Firebird scales from a single user to full blown client server system and has no .NET dependency.

Answer 3

I would use 'normal' database (say MySql, Postgresql, Firebird, etc.) on server. Instead of copying files to server your winforms application would create custom tables (or even custom databases). After collecting data you could just get it back to your application using plain old SQL.

Answer 4

If you really don't want a DB/SQL Solution, you could try simple text files and ftp/xcopy files down and parse them into the back-office server as needed. ASP/VBScript or ASP.NET can create the files to store the basic feedback comments. Need to consider security of course!