>Charles, until recently products like Quickbooks, used by millions of businesses for invoicing and accounting on which they absolutely depend, stored its data in proprietary local files. Intuit's decision to change to SQLAnywhere wasn't exactly greeted with a "sigh of relief" by customers- depending who you ask, the opposite may well be true. ;-)
>
>Also, it's worth asking why so many vendors are offering freeware versions of their "big" databases.

Just as another data point, for their 2008 product Simply Accounting (by Sage) has switched to a MySQL backend, from Access/Jet they were using previously.

It looks like the players in this industry now think that Mom&Pop businesses deserve big(ger)-company data integrity and security.