>What was your intended HW architecture for the OLEDB ? Unless you planned for a box with lots of cores to run the OLEDB-queries on tables sitting on the same box I don't think you will have a scaling problem very soon, if you can live with the 4 gig size limitation. If your business calculation has no room for the licensing cost even if the traffic is high enough for Express version to be hard pressed (AFAIR - pls verify yourself! 1 Gig of RAM alotted and only one CPU used - dunno if socket or core is specified) you still have some time left to check out your other options. Yes, it will cost YOUR time and money - but you have a running program and at least you have backend portability cost already verified afterwards <g>.

I am not sure what you suggest. Are you saying that SQL Express would be an acceptable solution for the backend?