>SQL Server 7.0 is quite easy to maintain compared to Oracle. You can start a logging program in SQL Server, let it run for a month, and then pass the log file into a performance analyzer and it will suggest indexes to create and remove. Just click OK and it does it.
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>The project my company is working on was going against an $250K Oracle server and was not performing well at all. We dumped the data into a $10K SQL Server box and it performed better than the oracle box. We felt that the oracle box was not tuned properly (even with serveral inhouse oracle dba's), so we called in an expert oracle guru at $250 an hour to check our stuff and he could not find anything wrong. He said to re-write the app in an oracle native format and not use ODBC.

Hmm, we have exactly the opposite experience with our Oracle servers, VFP and ODBC. Our performance is excellent. However, for a single user with potential to expand, I would go with MSDE [which is SQL Server and is free]. Plus performance of up to 5 users on MSDE is acceptible [quoting from Jim Duffy]. At that point, you would migrate to a server running SQL Server.