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

And that is easy to supply and cheap or free as well. Using SQLExpress you have a free database engine that is extremely reliable, fast, securable, and scalable (the free version supports 4Gig databases for starters).

One of our niche markets is retail POS systems which we sell Microsoft RMS and develop add-ons and provide ad-hoc services for. RMS uses SQLExpress (previously used MSDE), which is a *major* selling point - especially for the mom-and-pop retailers who may run their whole store on a single computer. Larger orgrnizations buy SQL Server (either standalone or as part of SBS) to scale up their database size. Works great, and the customers actually brag about it!