Main features

UltraLite is now a full-featured relational database management system, designed with ease-of-administration and SQL Anywhere compatibility in mind. Despite the addition of many new and useful features, UltraLite still maintains a small footprint size. See Data size and object limitations for a complete list of UltraLite limitations for this release.

Main features of this release include:

  • Increased database limits    The UltraLite database limits have been dramatically increased. In particular, the maximum number of rows in a table has been increased to 16 million. See Data size and object limitations for other current database limits.

  • Integrated schema   UltraLite is now a standalone RDBMS and no longer requires a separate schema file to define the logical structure of the database. For this release, the UltraLite schema is fully integrated with the database. See UltraLite database schema for details on the internal database schema.

  • Consolidated file formats   File formats have been consolidated in version 10 of UltraLite. This means that most platforms can now share a database file. If you need characters that are not defined by the collation you require, you should now choose to UTF-8 encode your database. See UltraLite platform requirements for character set encoding and UltraLite utf8_encoding creation parameter for details.

  • Increased database performance and data integrity   Overall, the UltraLite database performance and data integrity has been improved with several indexing and database page management improvements.

  • Indexes may utilize hashing   Indexes may now be specified to utilize hashing. The hash size can be specified on a per-index basis. The hash size can improve performance of index lookups and may affect database file size. See Optimizing UltraLite query performance

  • Direct database creation   You can now create UltraLite database files directly; a database schema file or reference database file is not required as the source for an UltraLite database. Instead, you can independently create an UltraLite database with Sybase Central or a command line utility, or even programmatically from an application.

    For existing UltraLite users, you can no longer create databases in the same manner as previous versions. See Upgrading UltraLite.

  • Direct Windows CE support   With this release, UltraLite applications from the desktop can connect directly to databases deployed to a Windows CE device. You can specify an UltraLite database by specifying the path and name and prefix it with WCE:\. These direct access is supported by all client applications and administration tools, including Sybase Central and Interactive SQL. See Windows Mobile.

  • Embedded SQL as a dynamic SQL programming interface   In previous versions, embedded SQL was a static interface. In this version, it is an interface to UltraLite dynamic SQL and does not require a SQL Anywhere database. Embedded SQL support also supports dynamic ESQL statements and the use of host variable placeholders. Furthermore, ESQL applications can also now run with uleng10. You can achieve this by linking against ulrtc.lib instead of ulrt.lib.

    As a result of this change, you may notice that simple embedded SQL applications could grow in size, whereas complex applications may become smaller. See Upgrading UltraLite and Developing embedded SQL applications.