I'd imagine the price would actually be much more, since you're using the MSSQL 2000 database with an internet front end. (This is typically an excuse for the software vendors to turn you upside down to see how much money falls out of your pockets...)

That said, $2000 is positively cheap for such a database. If you're looking for something lighter on the pocketbook, you might try SQL Anywhere Studio. I haven't used it for a couple of years, but this is a very fast, low maintenance and quite featureful database that runs on Linux and Win32. You can access it using DBD::ASAny, DBD::Sybase or DBD::ODBC.

Another capable (moreso than MySQL, IMO) open source database that runs well on both Linux and Win32 is FirebirdSQL. I haven't had much experience with it, but it's derived from the code for InterBase which has been around for ~15 years. You can access it using DBD::InterBase or DBD::ODBC.

Chris
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