> > > And yes, it's cheaper. But if you use MSDE, you don't have to pay
> > > for MS SQL either.
> >
> > but the free MSDE you get the extra bonus of throttled connections
>
> Amongst other limitations.
>
> What it all comes down to is:
> - what do you need
> - how much do you want to pay for it
>

Do not discount MSDE so easily. A few months back we put up FB1.5 vs
MSDE 2000 in a fairly large insert/update/read test. We had 40 clients
executing a scripted test of inserting 100 tousand records and and
then reading them back (every record had a fairly large BLOB embeded,
altogether aproximately 750 MB of data)

Well, FB1.5 was almost 40% slower in this test then MSDE. The reason
for it: FB saturated the 100Mbit lan. The processor never got more
busy then 30% because the network could not handle any more packets.
MSDE on the other hand maxed out the processor but could transfer data
more efficiently.

Oh one more thing, it was also quite ingenious how the SQL dev
prevented the governor in MSDE with a locking startegy to kick in even
with 40 concurrent clients.