As for the API, I agree that on UWP, it’s too low level.
For desktop platforms, I’ve built my own ORM on top of that: https://esentserialize.codeplex.com/
However, I’m too lazy to port that on Windows Store unless I’m paid for that: the main problem isn’t ESENT, it’s the reflection that I use extensively for serializing/deserialising those records/fields.
Edit: but if you only need key-value storage with both keys and values being blob of bytes, the complete implementation on top of Managed ESENT will be like four pages of C# code.
The main complexity in ESENT isn’t DB initialization.
For initialization, you copy-paste DB initialization code from PersistentDictionary or some other sample and forget about that (until much later when you'll be optimizing the DB performance).
The hard parts are column schema, index schema, queries, schema upgrades, and also on servers it’s concurrency.
For desktop platforms, I’ve built my own ORM on top of that: https://esentserialize.codeplex.com/ However, I’m too lazy to port that on Windows Store unless I’m paid for that: the main problem isn’t ESENT, it’s the reflection that I use extensively for serializing/deserialising those records/fields.
Edit: but if you only need key-value storage with both keys and values being blob of bytes, the complete implementation on top of Managed ESENT will be like four pages of C# code.
The main complexity in ESENT isn’t DB initialization. For initialization, you copy-paste DB initialization code from PersistentDictionary or some other sample and forget about that (until much later when you'll be optimizing the DB performance). The hard parts are column schema, index schema, queries, schema upgrades, and also on servers it’s concurrency.