Hello,

I am developing a tiny program for myself - single exe file, a few MB big. It's basically a glorified calculator with some data.

I thought to go with SQLite and Entity Framework, since the data and program are tiny I need a tiny database and since the database schema is not designed to ever be changed and I only need SELECT and UPDATE queries to be executed against it I thought Entity Framework would be best. I wanted to use EF to get some training on it and because in my opinion ADO.NET would not be better suited.

But since SQLite + Entity Framework = VS 2015 and I have 2017 and can't seem to get 2015 Community to run on my machine I decided I might look at some alternatives of these two.

For Entity Framework I have seen Dapper, OrmLite, NPoco, PetaPoco and Massive but they all look like ADO.NET with a different name. I'm sure they have their uses and cases where they would be better than ADO.NET but for my intents and purposes I don't think any of them are suited.

So, I'd like to ask for suggestions as to what database to use instead of SQLite that has to be just as light as it is, I don't need a 100MB overhead on a 3MB application just to connect to a database file (and it must be a file, no server to connect to) and what to use instead of Entity Framework that is not ADO.NET or ADO.NET with a different name.

Thank you!