Does any one have experience or solution for this? Here is what I want: I need to develop an application that would be running on only one computer which is not networked in anyway. It will be a standalone PC and it would not have internet connection. The application I need to develop would most probably be written in Java - and it may go for Java swing components. The application would need a database. I need to install the database on the same computer. What open source or free database options do I have that would let me develop an application using Java on it? Can MySQL be setup on a standalone PC and be accessed by Java on it? If not are there other options and what are they?

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Try SQLite ( http://www.sqlite.org ) - one of the very best in free & open-source embeddable SQL compliant databases.. I use it for every single one of my standalone applications.

MySQ can easily be set-up on a standalone PC, but it still has to be setup as a Service/Daemon and will act the same way as a remote server. For small applications, this is too much of an overkill and SQLite gives you a decent way out here..

You can manipulate SQLite databases using the C++ API (which is kind of messy) or you can take the easier way out by using some wrappers which provide you with standard classes for manipulating SQLite DBs.. here are a few:

• http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=SqliteWrappers - The COMPLETE List
• http://www.ch-werner.de/javasqlite/overview-summary.html
• http://freshmeat.net/projects/java_sqlite/

Hope this helps

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Thanks for the link to SQLite, miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG. I sure will check it out.

But from the brief description that you have given, it seems to be a database with APIs in C/C++. I can very well use C/C++ but for this project, I would like to use Java (and the Swing classes along with it).

Can I connect to this database from a Java program?

And about MySQL - it may seem like an overkill to go for this option, but if I can have a program written in Java connect to it, I do not mind going for a MySQL setup.

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I've had tremendous success with HSQLDB. HSQLDB is the embedded, all-java, relational DBMS that's used as the storage backend for OpenOffice.org Base.

Your other option for an embedded RDBMS is to look at the apache derby project. I don't have much experience with it though, so I can't say how it compares to HSQLDB.

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