[spudlyo]

Also, I don't even want to try to imagine shipping an installable desktop application for non-technical users that relies on MySQL!

It's really not that hard to imagine. There is an embedded library version of MySQL called libmysqld which is made for this very purpose. Of course as you point out it's quite overkill for something that would work perfectly well with Berkeley DBs.

[creshal]

I've never seen it used like that, but Microsoft's equivalent SQL Server Express is a nightmare in deployment and support, because you need to administer a full-blown SQL Server on every customer PC (backups, migration debugging, …). I've no idea why people don't use SQLite instead.

[Renaud]

_SQL Server Express_ is not the MS equivalent of SQLite.

_SQL Server Express_ is just a free (as in beer) limited version of _SQL Server_. It's still a full-blown traditional server like MySQL, Oracle and other that require services and administration tools to be installed.

Mirosoft has 2 equivalents to SQLite: The Jet database engine is pre-installed in all versions of Windows and allows creation of .mdb databases (those used by older versions of MSAccess). You don't need to include any dll file to use it.

The other is _SQL Server Compact_ which, like SQLite, is an embedded engine that you can bundle with your application by including a library.

All of these embedded databases are able to do multi-user writes to some extent. Jet is actually quite good if careful with locking (emphasis on careful). SQLIte is a de-facto standard because it's simple, performant, cross-platform and flexible.

While it can replace full-blown databases in some cases, it's far from being always true. There are still many cases where using something like SQL Server Express may make more sense, for instance if you want to offer a path to your customer for drop-in replacement of the database based on the growth of their needs over time. Not saying it's not a costly lock-in, but it's an easy one to sell.

[WorldMaker]

It should be noted, of course, that both Jet and SQL Server Compact are essentially considered "deprecated" technology and are not recommended for new development efforts. The compact database format Microsoft recommends these days (and which comes bundled with the Universal Windows Platform SDK these days) is now actually SQLite.

[rwmj]

SQLite is popular enough for Windows applications that SQLite had to rename its temporary files to "etilqs_..." (SQLite backwards) to avoid getting unnecessary bug reports from naive users (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-...)

[alex_hitchins]

Certianly from my experience the main reason for using it is that once it becomes to large for a desktop machine it's trivial to migrate to a 'proper' MsSql server.

I also don't find the admin side much of a faff. Provide your users a backup/restore option within your app and ensure you install your own instance.

[douche]

SQL Express has some rather shitty default configuration when you install it, that you usually have to change to actually use it for anything useful.