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The information on this page about db.* is based primarily on a reading of the on-line documentation for db.*. All information is believed to be correct. However, the author is not a db.* expert and so there could be errors. If you see any errors or omissions you are encouraged to make corrections.
Fundamental Differences
Db.* is designed to be embedded in a C/C++ application and access data using a library of C function calls. It does not have an SQL layer. The emphasis is on small size.
SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. It is larger than db.* but provides the power of SQL in order to make application development easier.
On-disk Database Representation
SQLite stores all information for an entire database in a single cross-platform disk file. Db.* stores each table and index in s separate disk file. The file format used by db.* is not portable between big-endian and little-endian machines. (To be fair to db.*, it appears to be designed for use on embedded hardware where cross-platform is never a concern.)
No direct comparision of the database sizes is available. However, based on the file formats one would expect a db.* database to use less disk space when all records are nearly the same size (contain strings with the same number of characters and numeric values of the same magnitude.) When records are of varying size, SQLite database files are expected to be smaller.
Data Integrity
Both db.* and SQLite provide transaction data integrity. If a program or OS crash or a power failure interrupts a database change, the change is either automatically completed or rolled back after the next reboot. The database is not corrupted by an incomplete write operation.
Database Access Methodology
Db.* uses a library of C/C++ routines to read and write the database. The database uses a fixed schema that must be defined before the application is compiled. Parts of the database layer are recorded in automatically generated C header files. Any change to the database schema requires that the application be recompiled.
SQLite uses the SQL query language to both define the database schema at runtime and to read and write data from the database. SQLite is able to handle varying database schemas without requiring a recompilation.
Both db.* and SQLite read and write directly from disk through a page cache. This is in contrast to other embedded database engines (ex: CloudScape/Derby or HSQLDB) that read the entire database into memory and operate from in-memory data structures.
Memory Utilization
Db.* claims a code footprint of about 100KB. SQLite is over 2 times larger, approaching 250KB. Both db.* and SQLite have a runtime database cache which is adjustable in size.