I believe with Access 2K you can choose your poison. You can continue to use the old Jet engine OR use the MSDE (Microsoft Desktop Engine). MSDE is a scaled down version of Sql Server. It shipped at the same time Sql Server 7 did. IIRC, the limits on MSDE proper are 2 Gig database limits and 5 concurrent connections. MSDE is free (as in beer). The Access implementation of that engine does not have, I don't think, the 5 connection limitation, but I suspect it's the same product.