Stand alone Datacontainer/Database - c#

I work in a call center and we need to use a lot of web based tools and work with a lot of information. They way we need to work is not efficient, so I made myself a couple of C# Windows Application to make my work a bit easier.
The problem is that those computers a locked en secured in a very high level. Almost all website's are blocked, we can't use USB drives to get data on the pc, the only way to get data to my account at work is to mail it compressed in a 7z file. We can't install software, drivers etc. I luckily have write access to the program data folder to save some data. But the only way I can store data is to put it all in .txt files. I've tried a lot of standalone databases but I'm also limited in space because we've got 30MB. So a standalone version of xampp (or similar software) is almost 40 MB so I can't use it.
Does anybody know I type of database to store my data is (mostly text and integers)? I prefer a single file which i can drop in the program data folder. I prefer it also to get the data in the same way like getting it from a database, dataset or something similar.

You may want to look into Infobright Community Edition which can give you incredible compression ratios on average from 40:1. Infobright is exactly like mysql and very compact.
Disclaimer: the author is affiliated with Infobright.

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How to stream music in C# with PostgreSQL

I am trying to recreate some features of Spotify in C# using the PostgreSQL database.
The reason is simple, I want to gain more knowledge, and I think this is a good challenge.
But I ran into an obstacle that I've been standing for days. Spotify he doesn't download the music, he does her streaming, plays the music while it's downloaded.
However, I can't do this in C#, I'm using the PostgreSQL database.
I'm well locked in this part, I tried several implementations, but I think I'm not on the right track, and on the internet I imagine I'm looking wrong, otherwise I would have found it.
Do you have any guidance for this streaming process in C#? I've tried to read the large_object bytes from PostgreSQL, but couldn't.
Any suggestions or guides about the process are welcome.
You start by getting the file into the database or its network location into the database, whichever gives you better performance; Then start with creating an implementation of a bytestream. You want to be transmitting raw data to c#.
you then build a real time interpreter that takes in using your file format, one byte at a time, and plays the value associated with that section. does that make sense? this is simple to do with many libraries and the brunt of it is just figuring those out.
You seem like you've PROBABLY got that first part down, and are instead having issues with the database. A lot of things we did at my last company involved saving file network locations and indexing files on disk. You might be able to instead point your streamer to a file locally using a server, and instead transmit data from one point to another in that manner instead.
You seem more than capable of doing this just judging by your speech. I hope this comment was helpful, and if it was not I apologize as well. I would be interested in seeing your finished result.
for clarification here would be that workflow:
request for a song listed in table dbo.Songs
matches that song onto dbo.songlocation
streams from dbo.songlocation.location from the filename dbo.songlocation.songname = dbo.song.name and verified directory returns true
enjoyment of that music

How to configure BDE to connect to an existing Paradox db with .net application?

Hoping in can find someone who is familiar with this scenario. I've not touched Paradox in over 12 years, and most posts I find on the subject are 5+ years old.
I have created a C# application to read a Paradox .db file using OLEDB and the Borland Database Engine (BDE) to retrieve a transaction code. I have no control over the Paradox system, my only access to it is through a UNC path to the .db files. The original developers of the system are no long in business, so there is no support. Hence the reason I'm having to "hack" a solution to my customers problem.
For development I copied the relevant .db files locally and had no problem accessing them. However when I try to access the live files, the error I get is that they are under the control of a different .LCK file. Deleting the .LCK file solves the access issue, but obviously that is not the solution.
The existing system has the "server" a Win7 machine, and 3 clients running what I assume is the Borland / Paradox application.
Is there a way to configure BDE (or some other workaround) to allow access to the live files using the existing .LCK files? I've tried with different values in the BDE "NET DIR" setting.
My only other option that I can see is to load the entire .db file into memory, (I have code that does that without BDE) then find my transaction value, which is not ideal as that takes around 15 seconds, and as this is a Point of Sale application, it needs to be much faster. Select statements via OLEDB work perfectly in this regard.

Displaying a large collection of large images

OK, I thought this was a fairly simple task, but apparently it isn't ...
I have a folder with +1000 photos in it. These are all photos taken with a camera, each about 3 MB. Users need to be able to view these pictures (as a list), rename or delete them. That's it.
A possible solution would be this control : ImageListView - CodeProject
but because it has an Apache license, we can't use it.
So how to do it? Any ideas or suggestions? I'm using .NET 2.0
.... EDIT : .....................................
OK, apparently we CAN use the Apache license. (Also see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1007338/can-i-use-a-library-under-the-apache-software-license-2-0-in-a-commercial-applic) However, using the license is very confusing for me. I read the following guide but still don't exactly know how to apply it to our project : http://blog.maestropublishing.com/how-to-apply-the-apache-20-license-to-your-pr
it says:
you need two files in the root or top directory of your distribution.
What's exactly meant by 'distribution'? Is that our installed application, and top directory meaning Program files/OurApp/ ?
It also says:
Replace all [bracketed] items in the above notice statement. There are only two of these items so should not be hard for you to do.
But that would give me a notice file, reading :
Copyright 2012 OUR_COMPANY
Licensed under the Apache License, etc...
But our app isn't licensed under the Apache license?
I'm sorry but I'm very confused and don't want to make any mistakes with this legal stuff...
What would I need to do exactly to be able to use this control?
Perhaps you need your own control for this task.
What i think is just a sketch of what i`d do in your place.
You need your own control with paging(to show only limited photos to user) or scroll-event-driven(to load photos on demand).
Perhaps you need some thumbnail generator.
Point is you probably face a huge pile of photos, so you cannot get them all in one time.
"Thats it" is not that simple.
For 1000+ that is over 3 GB.
Would need thumbnails for faster preview.
If users are going to access this files directly then they would need NTFS permission.
Maybe what you want.
What you are going to get into in locking problems.
If one user has a file open then you cannot rename or delete it.
I know you are not going to like this but to do it right you need a server app to manage that folder and users access via a WCF service so there is a single control point.

Create a folder backed by software rather than OS?

I recently got put on a project where they're having issues with too many files in a folder slowing down access. I believe it is 10,000+ files in a single folder where windows starts to slow down access, we have something on the order of 50,000. All the files are small and most of the time we only need to access the newest .1-2.% of them via windows file and print sharing. I'd look into dividing the files into subfolders, except that there is a bunch of legacy code that is only able to look at a single folder.
My idea - I don't know if it is possible or even plausible - is to create a small program that buffers the newest .1-.2% files in memory, and retrieves the rest from disk as needed.
I had thought that years ago I'd read of a protocol that could simulate a folder on a hard drive. Is it possible?
Is there something out there that already does this? Is there a better option without major changes to the system?
What to other systems use for serving up a large number of files? Is there some other product that serves files that we could map as a network drive? Or some way to blend 2 folders so they look like one?
Putting aside the "correct way to solve this problem" for the moment, what you're looking for is called "Shell namespace extensions". There are several .NET resources for writing these explorer extensions.
http://namespaceextension.codeplex.com/
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1649/The-Complete-Idiot-s-Guide-to-Writing-Namespace-Ex
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13515/A-Namespace-Extension-Toolkit
And perhaps many more.
Of course - we must remember why it isn't a good idea to write explorer extensions in .NET.
Hope this helps.

DRM for videos bundled with a desktop app?

So, I have this desktop app built using WPF and C#. It's basically an offline course system that has videos, quizzes, and other assorted content. My dilemma is that I don't know how to protect the videos once they are downloaded and installed on the users machine? Are there any DRM systems out there that I can look into? I thought about storing them in a local encrypted database but I don't even know where to start with that (or if there is something else out there that I'm totally missing...)
Don't even know where to start looking on this one - any ideas?
this question might be helpful, but don't spend too much time on it as any DRM is likely to be broken (they spent millions trying to protect blu-rays and couldn't). At best you can deter the casual user, but you won't prevent the determined hacker, so don't waste time trying.
you could do something trivial to make sure that the files as is can't be copied and played as is (like swap a few bytes round in the header of the file to make it seem as if its garbage so won't be played, then unswap them in memory when you read the file - just an example, I'm no expert)
I've seen Bink video used in some games. I believe it has some sort of built-in "scrambling system", but I might be wrong.

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