Bruce,
One of the things I've recently discovered is that many of those promoting this or that around here have never actually done it themselves and are just repeating vendor slogans. The question to ask is "how many and how small were the companies into which you installed this yourself, and how did they cope?"
IMHO it's worth going to the Intuit forums and searching on SqlAnywhere which replaced local storage in newer versions of Quickbooks. There have been lots of troubles, and SqlAnywhere is far easier to install and maintain than some of the products promoted here. Intuit is the biggest supplier of accounting systems for small business, so IMHO it's smart to reflect on and learn from their experience.
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1
