The point that I inferred was my own indirect reference to the lack of an internal database engine on the part of .Net which carries the necessity of using an external data engine. Of course the engine of choice that's marketed to the purchasing department of any corporation I'm likely to work for is what? SQL Server. The client will not hear about ProgresSQL or Oracle or any of that (and heaven help them if they try to use Access for corporate data, yikkes!).

They're going to be convinced to spend their budget on the big infrastructure.

Then when I or the next consultant comes along the client will balk at my insignificant rate because they have already spent their budgetary wad on a lot of stuff they didn't need.

Yes it all boils down to this.

With Fox, I've been used to having a choice and I can show someone how it can save them money and make some money myself in the process, how they can deploy hundreds of apps and pay zero license fees. Yes, sometimes it's good to manipulate a million records on a server, and then sometimes it's good to work with a subset locally. I even used to think how the Fox language would be incredible in stored procedures because the SQL language at times seems so ... limited.

No doubt it's just that the old synapses get so used to firing in a certain order and anything else just seems so ... wrong. However, when I'm forced to change instead of being convinced, well, that seems closer to negative reinforcement, of doing something to avoid a negative outcome, like a situation straight out of a BF Skinner textbook: if a student is threatened with detention for coming to school late, the student always has another implied third choice ... to not come to school at all.

This is where I find myself ... of not accepting the choice presented to me, because that's what someone WANTS me to do. I despise being dictated to. And although the marketed-to masses may always blindly follow whatever direction they are given, no cognizant person likes to be forced to think a certain way or accept the latest thing as 'good' just because someone else proclaims it to be so.

Especially when it “ain’t always so.”

...A