Microsoft has worked hard to make .NET and SQL Server a powerful combination - and VistaDB brings that capability to a small, easy to deploy package. Instead of having to ship a large installation which has to be set up independently for your application to work you can just ship 2 MB of extra assemblies with your .NET application. It's easy to make applications that start with VistaDB and scale up with SQL Server, all from a common codebase.

Compared to Microsoft SQL Server...
Tiny Distribution: The core engine is just over 1MB in size when deployed (often 450kb when compressed) compared to over 132MB for the compressed SQL Express installation.
Cross-Platform: Works on 32 or 64 bit and can be deployed under Mono and .NET
Full Database Encryption: Instead of just encrypting individual fields or tables the entire database file is encrypted.
No Privileges Required: VistaDB can be used even by guest accounts, not requiring any special OS permissions to create or work with databases or be deployed.
Easy Database Distribution: Since a database is just a file including schema and data it's easy to make backups and create new databases just using standard file operations.

Compared to Other Embedded Databases...
100% Managed Code for Simple Deployment: Only one set of assemblies is needed, covering 32 or 64 bit, Intel and ARM processors.
Impressive Commonality with Microsoft SQL Server: Data types, User-defined Functions, and even Stored Procedures can all be shared between SQL Server and VistaDB
FIPS-compliant Full Database Encryption: Securely encrypt the entire database including schema and data using FIPS-compliant AES encryption
Visual Studio Integration: Full designer support within Visual Studio including the Dataset designer, Entity Framework Designer, schema management, and query building.

Easy to Deploy, Program & Upscale
VistaDB is the ideal embedded database for .NET applications: easy to deploy, easy to program, easy to upscale to SQL Server.

Easy to Deploy
The VistaDB engine is a single, small managed assembly you deploy with your app and each database is a single file. No hassles with different versions for x86 versus x64. No COM objects to register. No installer to run. No database server to administer. Just xcopy and go!

Easy to Program
VistaDB is a fully compliant ADO.NET data provider with support for Entity Framework, ADO.NET, and Typed Datasets as well as its own Direct Data Access API for efficient cursor-based operations. VistaDB offers impressive compatibility with T-SQL including stored procedures, updatable views, cascading updates / deletes, table value params, CLR Triggers and CLR stored procs.

Easy to Upscale
VistaDB fully supports the ADO.NET Provider Factory model allowing you write one codebase that can target either VistaDB or SQL Server at runtime. Use VistaDB for the "lite" version of your application in which size and easy of deployment are paramount. And when greater scalability is required, upscale to SQL Server with no code changes.

Works with Anything built on ADO.NET
Think of all the things built on top of ADO.NET - not just your application but reporting systems, ORMs, and other data-driven libraries for .NET. You can use all of these in your application with our easy to deploy, cross-platform database engine.

Performance
We have done a deep dive into the way VistaDB processes queries and implemented many query optimizations. Relative to VistaDB 4.3, VistaDB 5 is generally 25-30% faster across the board with some queries now running in milliseconds rather than seconds, seconds rather than minutes.

SQL Compatibility
VistaDB 5 includes new T-SQL language features such as ANSI standard OFFSET/FETCH paging as well as new data types including DATETIMEOFFSET, DATETIME2, DATE, TIME, DOUBLE PRECISION, FLOAT, BINARY(N) and VARBINARY(N). VistaDB 5 also includes improved compatibility with T-SQL scripting and improvements to SQL functions such as CONVERT and RAND.

Security
The previous database encryption which used a managed implementation of Blowfish has been replaced with the FIPS-compliant AES implementation built into the .NET runtime. When an encrypted database is upgraded it will be converted from Blowfish to AES. For .NET 4.0 and later the FIPS-compliant unmanaged implementation built into the .NET runtime (which leverages the Microsoft Crypto API underneath) is used. For .NET 2.0 the managed implementation is used since the FIPS-complaint implementation isn't available.

The new encryption support is now database-wide instead of requiring individual columns to enable encryption. This protects the entire database including schema. This mode is also faster than the previous implementation.

Reliability
VistaDB 5 includes dozens of fixes for errors in the query parser and execution engine that have been reported by users of the past couple years. Additional bug fixes correct issues reported in VistaDB tools and Visual Studio integration.

Tooling
VistaDB 5 includes improvements to the Data Migration and Data Builder tools as well as support for Visual Studio 2013 and Entity Framework 6. In addition, VistaDB includes new diagnostic logging support that you can use with Gibraltar Loupe or other logging tools to assist with database debugging and query optimization.

Only for V.I.P