I've just started work on a VistaDB driver and dialect for NHibernate.

NHibernate is an excellent OR/M (Object Relational Mapping) Object Persistence framework for .NET and VistaDB is an embedded database designed to server as a replacement to Microsoft JET/ MSDE and Borland BDE.

Putting the two together should enable easy xcopy deployment of applications with practically no configuration, something especially useful for people evaluating an application, while still allowing the backend database to be replaced with something more heavy-duty if required and available (such as SQL Server or Oracle).

I have the main functionality working (saving and loading objects) although due to the way that identity columns work in VistaDB I have needed to change a line in NHibernate to support it (hopefully will be accepted as it does not effect any other drivers).

The next step is to ensure all the data-types are mapped to the correct (and supported) types in VistaDB and also to make sure the NHibernate NUnit tests run ok.