Distributing SQL Server Express without an installer (e.g. loose DLLs)?

Is it possible to distribute SQL Server Express as just a loose collection of modules (DLLs)?

We have an internal C# tool that uses a SQL server to create a temporary database for consumption by an C++ tool using ODBC. The dependency on SQL server makes the whole process unnecessarily fragile and slow due to network issues. If we could instead host the temporary database locally it would make our process much more reliable and a fair bit faster.

The on开发者_开发知识库ly thing is we distribute the internal tool as a collection of EXEs and DLLs: so I'd need SQL Express in DLL form not the conventional installer distribution. Is that possible?

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SQL Server Compact Edition is more like what I want, as it supports xcopy style deployment. Although it does not support ODBC so I may have to port the C++ code to OLEDB.

The alternative would be to use SQLite via ODBC instead, that will need a separate OLEDB driver for SQLite (for the C# tool).