Introduction

The tables showed above gives a complete reference to the hardware and software requirements for SQL server for CE. Take a look at the Windows CE device requirement. Depending on the processor type and components installed, 1 MB to 3 MB of storage space is required on the Windows CE device.

On the top of that Embedded Shruti doesn’t need a database that supports extensible set of SQL statements. Queries are made only by sending a key rather than writing the SQL statements. Keeping this design issue in mind, using SQL server for Windows CE will just eat up the resources while not producing any significant gain. For an embedded application 1 MB space (minimal Windows CE installation) is quite large. The application needed an extendible hashing based database which would save the database values according to the key field and then retrieve the values efficiently. Extendible hashing is an efficient implementation since retrieval is having a complexity of O (1+alpha) where alpha is the load factor. For balanced hash tables the retrieval will give better performance than SQL server for Windows CE which have to process the SQL queries involving extra overhead. A well known hash based database called GDBM which is quite popular on UNIX platform is ported on Windows CE platform and used in Embedded Shruti. Thus Embedded Shruti uses a variant of GNU software and thus is a merger of Microsoft technologies and Open source GDBM project.

The next section will introduce the GDBM (GNU Database Manager) in general.