BWAA-HAAA!!!! I don't consider CE to be SQL in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I'm sure the abbreviation of "CE" actually stands for "Crippled Edition" or "Cruddy Example" or "Crap/Excrement". It's nothing more than a data dumping ground for the very things people have mentioned. It can't use stored procedures, functions, views, or even variables. The best it can do is be interfaced with a front end using 100% embedded code. Sure, it'll run some pretty limited SQL scripts. After I found out what it was for, I never looked at it again. Certainly not long enough to be made familiar with the file extensions it uses. 😛

My closest contact with CE was when my boss asked me to convert some rather sophisticated T-SQL to CE. After studying about its limitations, I told my boss that he really needs to hire a good front end developer that can read T-SQL well enough to write objects and procs in the "C" family of code from it because there was simply no way possible to migrate T-SQL to CE.

Does CE do what it was designed to do? Absolutely. And that's precisely why I don't use it nor do I study it. 🙂 It's apparently MicroSoft's answer to about the closest you can get to a NO SQL product without actually being one.