Software design problem

I have an application which will be distributed to a large number of people within my company. I开发者_运维问答 need to have some central data store for this application and dont have the budget for SQL server or anything like this. I noticed that there is a thing called a Local Database in VS2008... will this be suitable for a central data store? the volume of data is not large

thanks!

Note:

I do not have a server to host it on, This is not my choice, its just a condition i have to work under. The best i can get is space on the shared drive

MySQL is a free, open source database that you can use as well.

Why not SQL Server Express? It's free and fully featured.

Have you got access to a Web Server at your company.

If the clients only need to read the data you could just serve up an xml file from a well known URL.

If you have to use a file share system I would use an Access database. But there is a good chance you will experience some kinds of file corruption at some stage, and if you have many concurrent users untold bad stuff could happen. Basically a file share database works well for one user on a local PC and that's about it.

There is also Postgres, its a bit more robust than MySQL and is free just the same.

System.data.sqlite is a decent option as well for use with Visual Studio, it is also free (but may not be the best option for a large number of clients, although the setup would be easiest by far).