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If you use a DAL generation technology like SubSonic or use linq in your code it shouldn’t matter what your DB is.

MS Access is free but it sucks no serious developer should ever use this.

MySQL is free and maybe lacking in a few features but it is a valid alternative if you don’t want to shell out cash for SQL Server.

Oracle is a huge pain in the butt. Don’t use it with .Net technologies unless absolutely necessary. It is like hitting a railway spike with a train that needs 30 people to make sure it stays on the tracks. Or like some other crazy analogy. You can’t do simple things like declare a boolean column or set a primary key column as identity. You have to do everything manually and you have to endlessly muck around with triggers. After the initial set up costs it gets cheaper to use but the initial set up costs are pretty big. Also the documentation is sparse and the error codes are as cryptic as they come.

M$ SQL Server is quite simply amazing. Don’t take it for granted. Flexible, scalable and easy to use. Books online is your best friend.