Connecting with Other Databases

There are many other database engines besides Microsoft SQL. It’s not uncommon to need to connect to, or at least import data from, some other database system. You could do it using the CSV method discussed earlier, or you could save a step and connect directly to the database. For this example, we’ll take the last option and connect to a SQLite database.

To follow along with this example, you’ll need to download the System.Data.SQLite package available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlite-dotnet2. This page has a link to the ADO.NET 2.0/3.5 Provider for SQLite. Download and run the setup file to install the provider into Visual Studio.

Once this has been installed, you’ll have a new option on the Attach Data Source Wizard for SQLite Database File (see Figure 5-8). If you search around a bit with Google, you should be able to find any number of different sample SQLite databases. There’s even a sample of the NorthWind database available for testing, which I’ll use for this example (http://code.google.com/p/northwindextended/).