Just today I stumbled upon Sybase SQL Anywhere. Of course I had heard of Sybase before, but I never looked at it because of its price. But that’s ASE, the Enterprise edition. For smaller companies and/or developers, there is SQL Anywhere Studio. As far as I can see now, SAS for Windows costs about US$399.
What remains is DAC’s for Delphi. It seems there are dbExpress drivers, but the document doesn’t tell me if they will work with Delphi 6 (they refer to Delphi 7 and Octane). Let’s hope so.
There are third party DAC’s, but they are not as common as DACs for SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle.
SQL Anywhere Studio includes a personal database (like MSDE/SQL Server Express), ASA (the client/server-version of the database) and UltraLite, to be deployed on PDA’s.
The Developer Edition of SQL Anywhere Studio is free! I’ll have a try with that and see if it’s any good. If the mailserver turns out to be a usable product and I will be using it myself (of course) I can always buy a non-developer license.