Serialization or SQlite?

I'm making a patient database program using Visual C#. It will have forms and will consist of 3 tabs with i开发者_运维问答nformation about the patient. It will also have add, save, previous, next buttons and a search function. The most important thing is each record will have like 60 items/columns/attributes per record and the records could reach to 50k-100k or more.

Now my question is, which is better for my program? Should I use SQlite or Serialization/Deserialization?

Thanks

The "database" word in the question strongly suggests that just serialization/deserialization isn't enough. Of course if you can fit all of your data into memory and you're happy to perform all the querying yourself, it could work - but you'll need to consider the cost of potentially reading everything into memory on startup, and possibly writing everything out whenever you change anything.

A database does sound like a better fit to me, to be honest. Whether SQLite is the most appropriate database for you or not is a different question though.

Having said all of this, for the C# in Depth website I keep all the information about comments / errata in a simple XML file, which is loaded lazily and saved every time I make a change. It works well, it's easy to manage, and the file is human readable in source control when I want it. However, I have vastly fewer records than you, and they're much simpler too. I don't have any search requirements - I just need to list everything and fetch by ID. My guess is that your needs are rather more complex, hence my recommendation to use a database.