Recommend an Application Development/Report Writing Tool?

HI everyone.

I'm an experienced Access developer who appreciates the many wonderful abilities that Access has as a front end development tool on an Oracle database. I do a lot of work using DAO objects and pass through queries (ie, SQL using proper Oracle, not Jet, syntax). However, one of Access's faults is that it is not very portable. Some might say VB is an alternative, but it's not - it doesn't have the nice bells and whistles the Access report writer has, for example and I've tried using it once against my Oracle Db a few years ago and it was nightmarish.

I'm looking for something that will let me easily connect to my data and use subforms/subreports, the ability to bind data to forms/reports and will allow me to escape the "enslavement" of having to run around to different installs and making sure a proper ODBC DSN is set up. Add to that something that doesn't rely on users having to have a licensed copy of Access to run my apps. Hopefully such a tool would also have an active developers' forum such as a usenet group, mailing list, etc.

My background is I'm a manager who runs a computerized maintenance management system (a very poorly done one, in my opinion, but one I am stuck with) and I need to be able to supply my users with reports and some data manipulation ability.

Thanks very much in advance for any suggestions.
--
Tim    http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~tmarshal/
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