>Hi everyone
>
>My friend give me a suggestion, updrage my system database from .DBF to SQL one.
>
>Most of my client are mid/small size company, which SQL is low-price and avalibale ?

SQL Server (or Oracle) are clearly not fit for midsize companies. However you may wish to take advantage of the C/S technology instead of "plain and simple reasons":
- security,
- access control,
- network bandwith,
- sql grammar (generally superior on sql engines when driving highly complex stuff).

There are alternatives to costly and complex "sql engines"... simple and less expensive ones. May i recommend "Sybase ASA", a superb peace of technology that works perfectly with all MS development tools including VFP.

You may test other products. Some are free... But make sure that the installation process of the product you choose is not too complex and that you feel at home with them in an acceptable timeframe. Most of those "db engines" are tricky when comes to set-up. Some are even a pain to manage because their admin UI is poor or badly designed.

We have used Sybase ASA for quite a number of years, thoroughly tested against recent versions SQL server.

MS SQL server has improved recently. It is definitely faster (especially on simple queries on fat tables) but... we keep ASA for midsize apps.

The cost of setup and long-term ownership for ASA is really low compared to big guns. It has enough power under the hood for the kind of apps we deliver (ranging from 2/4 to 30/50 users).

It runs lots of differents platforms (w32, linux, novell, differents versions of unix...).

It offers a "date" data type distinct from the "datetime" data type and lots of effective date and datetime functions. SQL server is really dumb in this respect with only a "datetime" datatype and a poor set of related functions...

We appreciate the fact that with all db servers, both the database and network traffic can be fully encrypted hence totally secure. We needed that badly. ASA is really good for complex apps running midsize dataset (db size below a few GigaBytes).

One point though concerning ASA, Sybase pricing is adequate and fair (as compared to other products) but will only become aggressively cheap if you can commit buying big numbers. We cannot :(

François