Database problem....

Dear,

I am trying to develop a web-based application using ASP(This application will be installed to my clients, and just for internal usage only-Intranet), and it is for commercial usage.
What i want to know about is which Database is the most econimic and realiable??? MS SQL is very expensive(USD 1000)... so my next choice is MS Access, but if i want to use Acesss then i have to buy MS Office XP Pro (USD 260). And i know that mySQL is Opensource and there are so many versions... if for commerial usage i still have to pay... rite?

Excel, XML, etc... these are not fulfil to my requirements... what is the best solution???

PS: actually client side not neccessary "physically" open the Database file, they only will use my system to read & write to Database... my question is can i just created a DB file(eg. MS Access), when the time i deploye to client side client still can write data to DB???

Thanks

Use MySQL. It's free. Completely freeeeeeee. And it's great.

even for commercial usage? but i saw there are 2 different lincenses....

i havnt really looked into the commercial side of it but i have sql server 2000 sp3a (it says evaluation on it so i assume thats free as long as you dont upgrade.. it doesnt seem to have anything missing or any timbbomb etc *shrugs*)

im not really sure about the portable client files though, ms access does .mdb but access is slow and insecure.. you should be able to buy it on its own instaed of in the office suite (i bought frontpage and publisher on their own.. then office turned out to be "office with frontpage" so that was a bit of a waste :p) when you set up a mssql database it saves it to a pair of files (i think) so i dont know how portable these are.. clients shouldnt really need their own copy of the database thoguh should they?.. also if its on a LAN you can access sql server remotely (wan if you open your ports [which is dodgy] or get a 3rd party prog [think theres a good 1 on sourceforge somewhere, i didnt look into it much] or tunnel it with a java/c++/vb/whatever client-server pair to access the central database)

uhm, the sql 2000 evaluation version should stop working after 120 days (unless you applied the "patch" for that)

There is a free product called MSDE (MicroSoft Desktop Engine), it is just the sql server backend without enterprise manager and such tools. But you can get a lot of asp frontends for this database. I don't know if its free for commercial use, but it is (almost) as stable as sql server so try find some info about that

eep ive been using it for 6 months :confused: all ive put on it is the sp3a patch though *shrugs*