So as not to be completly wasting my time, I've been doing some research online this evening.  I came across MaxDB from MySQL.  It's an enterprise class database server.  It is also open source (as in free).  It looks like it might be a viable alternative for our in-house database needs at work.  I'm especially interested in the fact that it has ODBC support without a third party add-on.

Part of my problem using MySQL is that it requires a third party module for me to use it from .NET code.  The add-on I'm using now is free, but no longer supported.  The one I would like to use is to expensive for me to purchase for work due to budget contraints.  So this is definately something I'm going to look into more.  The only problem I'm seeing is that it runs on Linux and Windows, but not FreeBSD, which is my server OS of choice.  That's a solvable problem though.