 from paul linehan mailto plinehan yahoo com there are two open alternatives that i can think of that don t appear to have been mentioned elsewhere in this thread one is firebird this is my personal favourite it is URL and you can purchase support contracts here URL indeedy i had never even heard of firebird until we started a new job last week with a client who uses it so we popped it onto a box downstairs and wow it is fast comes with some lovely client tools also supports all the db goodies transactions stored procedures triggers it s really amazing to think how much they ve got out of a db that is only NUMBER mb in size that s NUMBER times smaller than the oracle _client_ having said all of the above oracle is really a super product but ya pays ya money ibm s dbNUMBER is another cheaper alternative to oracle free single developer license downloadable from their website fergal irish linux users group ilug URL URL for un subscription information list maintainer listmaster URL 