Having had the pleasure of reading all the responses to the fabulous debate, I am going to give my 2 cents worth. I just happened to pick this point to jump in.

I have been working on an Oracle DB for a new app for quite a while now. I have put tremendous effort into the DB - triggers, SPs, RI, etc. Because I have done this, developing the VFP front end has been an absolute breeze. In fact, the work on the back end has actually made my data front-end independent. IMO, this is the biggest selling point in putting so many eggs into the DB side.

I can now easily develop simple front-ends in just about anything that can access Oracle, including browsers, MS Access, VFP, Oracle Forms, etc. If someone else who has Insert, Update, Delete privileges on this DB, hacks in with some other tool like MS Access, I have very little to worry about because everything data is handled by Oracle.

I also have scripts [.SQL files] that can be modified and re-run whenever I need to change something on the data side. To me, DB, APP, etc., changes are a part of our lives and unavoidable. We should fully expect to have to make minor adjustments in our APPs if a data structure changes for example. If a structure is changed but we do not change our APP, what was the point of changing the table structure? [with respect to a new column, for example].