Try a free database server. I was in the same situation , but we wanted the switch to a client-server solution because frequent data corruption issues.
At that time I was considering MySQL, Postgres and Firebird SQL. MySQL is very fast but lacks transactions, stored procedures, triggers, foreign keys constraints. Postgres is very advanced, Oracle like, database server but it didn't had native windows version (I don't know what the situation is now).
So I downloaded and tested Firebird SQL, based on open source Interbase 6, I liked it and I use it now.
It is only 3M download (the documentation is much more - about 10M) but has a lot of features: stored procedures and trigger support, multi versioning transaction support (I heard that SQL Server will have this only in 2004) , foreign key constraints, domains, online backup, database shadowing. You can return record sets from stored procedures , join record sets returned by stored procedures, subselects, custom exceptions, database events,....
And, if something goes wrong or the open source project die, I have the Borland Interbase server as a backup solution (check it too, is much cheaper than SQL Server and easy to administer)


>SQL-Server is also being evaluated but the cost may be prohibitive to the project hence the research for using the VFP database considering VFP will be the front-end regardless of the database.
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>The reason for the question is because the DBF format is so well known and accessible by many products other than VFP. And that's the point, I need good code to prohibit that from happening.
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>Thanks,
>Steve
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