With IBM, Oracle and Sybase already playing in the relational lite space with shrunken versions of their RDBMS offerings, Microsoft is now offering a free download of its bite-size SQL Server offering, Microsoft Data Engine (MDE). MDE for Visual Studio 6.0 trails the arrival of Sybase Ultralite, which kicked off the lite trend on its launch in April, since when Oracle Corp’s Oracle8i Lite and IBM Crop’s DB2 Everywhere have all come to market claiming to match Sybase’s 50K footprint. Microsoft clearly doesn’t want to get left behind in the rush to populate next generation mobile devices, smartcards and embedded systems with cheap satellite databases which will be expected to help drive new sales of their more expensive server brethren . MDE will showcase at this week’s Tech Ed developer software conference in Dallas, Texas, where Microsoft will try and persuade developers to download their free versions of MDE and ignore the rest.
