What is the best database software / programme for a small company with huge product portfolio?

Hello everyone,





I work for a trading company that sells a wide range of product. We are looking into the possibility to upgrade our database and we have reserve a small budget for it.





Our companies has 15 major production lines that offer over 2000 types of product. Each production line has its own pricing programme and very often we offer special prices for our clients. Therefore we are looking for a user-friendly system that allows us to manage and modify (NOT just store) a huge amount of data, including production info, supplier info, customer info.





We are using MS Excel files as our database and we have wasted too much time on copying data from one file to another.


Below are my concerns for some database software that i know of:


Access - My colleagues do not have much access knowledge --%26gt; hard to manage? Long time to build the database?


MySQL - Too technical and powerful for a small company?


QuickBooks - Dunno much abt it, any opinion?





Any advice is welcome! Thanks!

What is the best database software / programme for a small company with huge product portfolio?
sql server 2005 - express will provide you with 4GB database space... and its free... should you need more space... you could opt for 2 database instances or you could upgrade to the fully fledged product...what could be better - a free great product - by microsoft?