What are the limitations to SQL Server Compact? (Or – how does one choose a database to use on MS platforms?)

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I’m not sure about encryption, but you’ll probably find this link helpful:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171955.aspx

As for the rest of it:
“Text” and “auto_increment” remind me of Access. SQL Server Compact is supposed to be upgrade compatible to the server editions of SQL Server, in that queries and tables used in your compact database should transfer to a full database without modification. With that in mind, you should first look at the SQL Server types and names rather than Access names: in this case namely varchar(max), bigint, and identity columns.

Unfortunately, you’ll notice this fails with respect to varchar(max), because Compact Edition doesn’t yet have the varchar(max) type. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon. However, the ntext type you were looking at supports many more than 255 bytes: 230 in fact, which amounts to more than 500 million characters.

Finally, bigint uses 8 bytes for storage. You asked for 11. However, I think you may be confused here that the storage size indicates the number of decimal digits available. This is definitely NOT the case. 8 bytes of storage allows for values up to 264, which will accomodate many more than 11 digits. If you have that many items you probably want a server-class database anyway. If you really want to think in terms of digits, there is a numeric type provided as well.

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