With us there are several reasons. The first is data security for personnel data. The second is we have about 1000 users scattered over 6 floors who are divided among 12 Novell servers on a LAN. Our Oracle server provides a really easy common server for our databases. Much of our data is also used for GIS [ArcView]. Lastly, we can more easily serve data up to our intranet and internet.

>Regarding front end tools. One may decide to use VFP but why are the tables in oracle and not vfp in the first place? Seems that there is a mixture of front and back ends.
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>>>as mentioned above apples and oranges.
>>>we use both oracle and ms sql server with vfp. naturally, as you may know, ms sql is much more compatible with vfp. but i tend to think that oracle is much more powerful then ms sql. *$0.02*
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>>There is already a more powerful database coming: CACHE - post-relational. With Oracle and SQL Server, you're dealing with layered tables, with CACHE it's a multi-dimensional database that is far faster in manipulating data. There is actually a benchmark done here, wherein, Oracle performed the process for about 4 minutes, whereas in CACHE, 45 seconds. The same code and the same frond-end tool used.