I have been developing mobile applications since 2000 and have had many issues with few good database options. Both Apache Derby and and Java DB are reasonably good db’s, but are better on CDC or desktop devices and slow on CLDC. They are both bigger than 3 MB with no data in them and many of their SQL statements are not standard SQL statements and there is no built-in JDBC.
Mimer Database only provides a JDBC connection to a server, except for Symbian. This is also true of a couple others.
J2MEMicroDB, Perst Lite and several others are object databases and some of them are over 30 MB.
There are other potential db’s listed as sourceforge projects, but never actually produced a product.
Pointbase is not on your list. It was a reasonable solution for this, but IBM bought the parent company and shelved the product. We licensed Pointbase, but IBM stopped the licensing after they purchased the company. However, even Pointbase was not well tested and produced errors on various SQL statements that their documentation indicated were supported.
Our experience has not been that positive for any of these solutions on the CLDC platform, although some have worked okay for the CDC platform. For CLDC there is a new solution being developed by our company, simply to deal with the frustration of the current options. The db we are producing takes only about 100K of space, supports all CLDC 1.0, CLDC 1.1 and CDC environments, provides an embedded JDBC driver, encryption, uencoding and a large portion of the SQL 92 standards. Thus, developers will have a truly light db for mobile phones that can process 10,000 joined records in 3 seconds with most transactions being less than 1/2 second. More importantly, this db has been tested with over 2,000 test points to ensure a quality product. We built it for our own use. But if anyone is interested in the db, which will be released in February 2009, let me know:
bruce.howard@zoduna.com.
