Kevin, How big are your inventory files? If it's a few thousand records, SQL Server *is* probably overkill; if you're doing queries on hundreds of thousands of records (and returning result sets of, say, a few hundred records) then it's probably your best approach. Kevin E. Stroud Right now we have some VB apps that use SQL 6.5 on the back end. We have about 20 active users. most of them doing simple inquires into inventory available for instance. I dont believe we have a busy system. The software seller tells me that SQL 6.5 is overkill.