Hi, William I had the same problem you are now facing, in fact I think i have allready solved it. my ( i repeat: MY ) answers to your questions are. 1)No, its not a good idea to install such a product in your firewall. Reasons: performance mainly. I currently run ISA Server SP1, W2K SP3 on a Pentium III, 800 MHz computer, 512 MB RAM, 60GB HDD and it works great. Unless you have a much better configuration than that i don't recommend SQl Server. The fact is it works flawlessly when you have minor activity in your server. When logs get to around 100MB a day (it does for me with flat text) your system performance may suffer. I also tried Access: functions great but the log databases grow big in a very short time. My winner is a minor database jet such as MySQL, reasons: great performance ans small files, even though I keep logs for my auditing program as old as two months. 2)Flat files will always work, databases may fail. I guess maybe there is a problem with the way ISA makes the logs. Someone (sorry i can't remember who) posted a way to get around the problem. If databases fail, keep in flat text. It's simple and that's the better way i think. I vote without the slightest doubt to use databases if you want to keep the logs for a long time or if you want to audit users or sites. If you have a great (dedicated) server and plenty of space, do it: databases wil give you no headaches. 3) I leave the third answer to the experts, aka: Tom, John, Gregg... Hope it helps JC