Extensible Storage Engine

File Format
Name	Extensible Storage Engine
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Databases Extensible Storage Engine
Extension(s)	.edb, .sdb, .stm

Extensible Storage Engine (ESE, EDB, ESEDB), also known as JET Blue (no connection with the airline) is a database engine from Microsoft used as the back-end database of a number of its products, and eventually a public API was released for it. .edb and .sdb files are used for database storage, and .stm for a streaming file. There are a number of different versions.

The method of database storage is ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).

An earlier and slightly different Microsoft database engine is Jet Red, which supports file sharing.

File identification

These signature bytes appear at offset 4: ef cd ab 89

Tools

• libesedb (tools for accessing ESE databases)

Links and references

• Wikipedia article
• Forensics Wiki article
• MSDN article
• Technet article
• Code Project article