>Do anyone out there have any experience with Codebase as a backend? If so, how did you like it? Was it easy to interface with a VFP application that can be both desktop and client/server and still use the VFP language for data manipulation? Or is it designed around the needs of C programmers? We want to consider it as an alternative to a costly SQL Server implementation, especially since it is free fox tables with no dbc and the drivers are written in C.

Have you considered some alternatives:
- for small installations MSDE/SQL Server Desktop Engine is free
- you could create a COM/DCOM data server component in VFP and access it remotely
- you could consider a Web-based system like West-Wind
- you could dig into Web Services

One advantage of something like CodeBase is that you can run it on non-MS systems e.g. *n?x. However, with open-source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL available on those platforms, CodeBase's market might be pretty limited.