Seeking feedback on Client-Server development tools

Several months ago, we purchased the Oracle back-end and Uniface front-end in an attempt to move our company out of the Filemaker era. The road has been, well, rocky. The Oracle stuff has gone pretty smoothly; as an experienced Unix sysadmin, I was able to get up to speed on it pretty quickly. Our application developer, a Filemaker wizard, has had a rough time with Uniface. He got the hang of relational constructs easily enough, but implementing stuff in Uniface has turned out to be a real bear.

The big problem is that Uniface does not allow queries to include an inner entity. Take, for example, a table of contact names, each of which contains a "foreign key" reference to a table of companies. That is, each record in the contact table is associated with a record in the company table. We can set up a Uniface screen to display a company and all its contacts quite easily. With this screen, we can search on any of the company information. But we *cannot* search on the contact information. If we want to find, for example, all the Smiths at Megacorp, we will wind up with all the contacts at Megacorp - the inner entity (contact) information is ignored. We have come up with some workarounds, but they are time-consuming, ugly, or both.

We are now making a reassessment of our goals, methods, and resources. To this end, we have several questions:

1. What level and number of human resources do you assign to your client-server database projects? What skills do you look for in your developers and like to see in your development team?
2. How much "out-of-the-box" functionality does your client-builder *really* have (as opposed to what the marketing materials imply it does for you)? Can you declaratively define your database in this tool, as you can with Uniface?
3. For inner-entity queries, what does your tool offer and what limitations does it present?

Thanks,

Steven Gaarder                              Network and Systems Administrator
gaarder_at_actech.com                          A C Technology, Ithaca, N.Y., USA