Arrays & Databases - Outdated SQL Server??!

Question

Hi, I'm developing a excel sheet like program. It can load csv files and calculate statistics on them etc... However I want to add support for acess, mysql files etc... and the possibility of downloading data from the internet. So I figured I might do this through ADO.Net. I've search the net for tutorials, found some but most were outdated. I tried setting up the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on my Win2K machine, and everytime I ran a C# trying to connect to it, it gave me failure on Open(), saying that I might not have enabled Remote Clients... Well firstly it was local, and secondly it kept saying so even after I changed the settings... So I'm just lost now, any ideas? Any good fresh tutorials from bottom up? Else from that, my program does not work with relational-tables. It's like one simple table, like Excel. I plan on simplyfing the whole process of loading an mdb file, so either the user can choose which table to load, or it just loads the "Main" table. Is there a better way to do this? My last question, is wether using a database(datatable or the like) would be faster than using a ListArray? Or maybe I should implement Genetics as my core? The most common form of data that I will have is a mix of number and text columns. One column is for text, one for numbers etc... Any suggestions? - Julian