Storing large amounts of data in a user application

[Zyril]

Hello everyone, this is not a question regarding any code, but a question where I hope some of you more experienced developers can give me some tips on how to accomplish what I want.

I have previously coded an application in java that lets the user keep a record of their wine cellar. This works well, though I want to add more functionality and features to it so that it supports some other end users desires.
Basically, I need to figure out a way to store data in a good way. What would be nice is to work with an SQL-database, but of course, this is a serverless application so that is not an option. I've previously worked with MS Access and Java connections to it, and that would work. The thing with this is that every user would need the JDBC-driver installed to be able to let the program access the MS Access .accdb-file. Therefore, I do not really see this as an option.

In my previous version, I've stored all the data in an ArrayList that is serialized to a file. I get the feeling that this is a "clumsy" way of sorting things out, and that there is a more simple and straightforward solution for my task. I've looked into SQLite, for a standalone internal database, but it seem that it cannot support more than a few datatypes (String, short, int, float and double are supported. [Source]

The good thing with a database is that I would be able to write simple queries to fetch the data that I need to be displayed to the user. This way I do not need to read a special file containing the serialized ArrayList.


Any thoughts and hints on what I can use to achieve this would be helpful!

Thank you! =)

/Z

[Wnt2bsleepin]

I believe that SQlite can store Binary data. Perhaps the wrapper you are looking at doesn't support it, but I am sure it can. Another option is to use SQL to store the location of a file. That way if you wanted to pull X user's data, you would look in the table for X user and it would have the directory or path of the file you need.

[Zyril]

I will look into SQLite a bit more, thank you Wnt2bsleepin!

Any other tips are welcome!