>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 a guess....but is it something along the lines of 'the first hit is free'? (grin)