>Yes, and Microsoft Office isn't the only office suite, either - but if this search is driven due to a customer demand that sounds suspiciously like "I've heard that I should be using SQL" rather than by real technical concerns it makes me suspect they won't go for a name they're not familiar with.

But that isn't what the question was? He asked for a cheap RDBMS. There is a big difference in MS Office vs. alternatives and MS SQL v. alternatives. Users don't have to change their desktop OS to use non-MS SQL apps.

>At the same time, the programmer is gonna spend a fair amount of time learning to tune SQL to a particular 'flavor'. It would be best for him if it were with something with more name recognition.

Name recognition isn't everything. SQL is SQL. Yes, there are variations, but learning to write MySQL apps isn't going to take up so much time that it is wasted if they never use it again. Plus, I'm not sure what the frontend is going to be, but connecting to a MySQL server is nearly the same as MS SQL server. ADO/ODBC.

j