SQLite is horrible with respect to features. There aren't even foreign keys on this thing, transactions and all. If you go with something that small, you could as well do binary serialization to file and then use Linq to object + some data structures to query things. I'd go for SQL Compact for which you can even do Linq to SQL using sqlmetal. It works very well, and it's deployable easily on Windows CE and clickonce applications. If performance doesn't cut it (because both SQLite and SQLCE are very very slow) I'd go with Firebird and hand coded queries. Firebird is actually fantastic when you look at the feature list. A very complete DBMS.