Thoughts on Pricing

How much does price matter when you are choosing software to base your application on?   That depends on the application:

If it's a small application that you are developing for free, then the price matters a lot.  You should probably use the BDE (which comes with Delphi), or one of the low-cost local-file-based options here, for $200 or less.

If, on the other hand, you are being paid to develop the application, the price doesn't matter much at all.  Why?  Because the database access software you choose could increase or decrease your development time by hundreds of hours or more.  The cost of the product will be insignificant compared to the value of the time you spend using it.  Is it worth saving $500 on a purchase if it costs you $10,000 worth of time?  Clearly not.  Therefore it makes sense choose whatever product will help you create the best software in the least time, with little regard to its costs (within reason).

This is not to say that more costly solutions are necessarily better; the low-cost product mentioned above may be perfect for a high-profile commercial application that needs a fast, simple, local database.  Also, some of the client/server oriented products sell for a surprisingly low price, especially compared to the Client/Server version of Delphi, which they eliminate the need for.

Deployment Pricing

The comments above apply to development system pricing; deployment pricing is a whole separate issue.  Deployment licencing costs can severely affect the final price of your product.  For example, Borland's MIDAS architecture, which implements a three-tier data access model, carries a deployment license cost of $300 per application server.  Depending on the intended deployment of your application, that could be a problem.

Pricing varies widely around the middle-tier world, though - there are Java application server products and CORBA product, for example, that cost tens of thousands of dollars per deployed server.

Most of the products here have royalty-free deployment.

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