>>On the broader topic: No, I don't think it is the best product on the planet, but using the advanced features in oracle or MS-SQL will give you performance/ease of development at the price of vendor lock in, something I remember JVP to argue strongly against (Couldn't resist <g>).
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>I actually don't recall JVP making that argument (not saying he didn't, I just don't recall). I know that John used Oracle-specific features in some of his Oracle work (perhaps because he had to).
>I freely admit that I take full advantage of the tools and capabilities in MS SQL.

I was neither making such an "accusation" (would it be something to "accuse"? no) nor am I critizising this approach (It defenitly has some good points for the client as well as for yourself). But almost every strategy has negative connotations on some dimensions, which is more in line of my argument. This bigger picture is IMHO often missing in the discussions mostly harping on details.

On first implementation I try to stay away from vendor specific things, unless they make overwhelming sense for the project. But when optimizing I have no problem using vendor specific options, as the Pareto rule hopefully eliminated most of the locations where vendor lock in is not directly needed. Better a usable, but partially DB-specific program than unusable ones - here I track you completely.

But at least from my POS <g> I cannot argue that the strength of the non standard extensions is enough to decide for one of the big 3: I have to listen more to wishes from my customer. Possibly your clients are more homogeneous in back-end architecture (or at least already support to a more-than-trivial degree MS-SQL) giving more weight to these factors than in some other cases - but this does not invalidate "automatically" the reasons other devs have found to decide for different backends.

(Note: dev expirience largely with one backend in my eyes is ONLY a sufficient reason for any backend if extremly high "tweak" level must be assumed, be it vfp, oracle or MS-SQL)

regards

thomas