Might as well post it here too:

IMO it's basically an Oracle-killer; what I mean is that it operates at about that level of functionality/maintainability. I'm still doing testing (haven't even got around to real benchmarking yet) but so far I've done two installs, one on a testbed and one on a production server, and dropped in a couple databases for fun; played around. There's a *wonderful* app called SQLStudio which catalogs all the objects (including system ones) and gives you direct design and edit modes, plus an SQL command executor. It's got a simple, reasonable user/group model, but I don't need much depth there; almost all my access will be through a proxy webserver-"user".

What else? Hmmm. It's hard to crow, since one of the reasons SAP released it in the first place is, in their words, that the DataBase as a system object IS/should be a commodity; i.e. - there aren't too many bells and whistles. Haven't run into any serious problems yet. I need to find out how stable the JDBC driver is.

It will do remote calls (TCP/IP, pipes, you name it), but not very quickly.

More as I think of it. Any specific questions? Until I get burnt I'm just going whole-hog with it, since in my mind *anything* is better than using MS Access, which I/we have been doing since I started here, oh, five years ago. :)