Interesting, I have opposite experience. Once I had lots of experience with AD and Exchange. Later I shipped desktop software based on ESENT, and supported it for a few years. Was generally happy with the technology.

Are you sure these issues are caused by the DB engine? Other possibilities include your PC (like interference with crappy AV software), or Microsoft’s code of these search indexing services.

This happens on large amounts of PCs and I don’t think the way Microsoft uses its own database engine should be an excuse for it corrupting its data.

I think the difference is that Windows Search is always running, including when the computer crashes, is turned off unexpectedly or doesn’t complete waking up from sleep or hibernation. I think JET just isn’t that robust against that. It’s quite conceivable people manually closed your software when they shut down their computer.

I remember Exchange failing the same way if its database disks suddenly disappear due to network issues.

> Microsoft uses its own database engine

Microsoft is large and software quality varies. For instance look a Skype, they failed to use their own GUI frameworks and are using Electron i.e. Google Chrome to paint a few controls.

> I think JET just isn’t that robust against that.

I think it is, it's mentioned everywhere:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/extensible-st...

https://stackoverflow.com/a/2369220/126995

Okay, ‘according to the documentation’ it probably is. In reality it isn’t.

Like they say,

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Here’s a list of things that can go wrong (here in the context of domain controllers):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server...

Some of them are just the unavoidable hardware failures, for others they suggest ‘Deploy the OS on server-class hardware’. Or the always helpful ‘restore from backup’. Not quite reasonable for a database containing a search index on a consumer device.

> Here’s a list of things that can go wrong (here in the context of domain controllers)

That article was written because DC is a business-critical infrastructure. Here’s a comparable one about Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/A87860_01/doc/server.817/a76965/c...

NTFS: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i...

> Not quite reasonable for a database containing a search index on a consumer device.

Before I switched to MS Outlook, I was using Windows live mail (now discontinued) as an e-mail client for a decade or so, it used ESENT for everything.

When I run process explorer and search for “esent.dll”, it finds a dozen of system services using ESENT databases, many of them critical like CryptSvc.

I try to buy good hardware, but that’s not server-grade components. I don’t use ECC RAM nor a UPS, and I suffer from brief power outages couple times a year. If ESENT would be corrupting databases when the power is turned off suddenly, I would have noticed.

Your experiment with a sample size of 1 proves, with an uncertainty of 100%, that the database never corrupts.

Experiments with a larger sample size show a different result.