Hi!

We are planning on developing a small application, the application will handle large amounts of financial transaction data and must be able to store the data efficiently. Thus we need an easily deployable database solution, which preferrably is file-based (such as access and dbisam), or requires minimal system changes and installation. (The program should be as "stand-alone" as possible).

I'm open for any suggestion, the database must me SQL compliant, and preferrably support transaction-SQL.

I am currently researching dbisam, Interbase 7.1 and SQL server DE.

Open for any suggestion and experiences with any database solution

InterBase (http://borland.com/interbase) and the open source fork that has turned into Firebird (http://firebirdsql.org) are great options because they have a small footprint and are very solid databases that require little or no maintenance. They're SQL-92 compliant and have great support for stored procedures, referential integrity, triggers, and transactions.

Firebird has an embedded version that is a simple .DLL for very small installations. This limits the database access to single-user, local-only accesss, but makes deployment painless. The entire database resides in one file (but is not "file-based") and databases can be backed up while in use because of the versioning architecture. Of course, being open source, it's much more cost effective for deployment.

Hope this helps!