Not sure I'm a really seasoned Oracle user though, I think I have a couple of things to say 'Why Oracle' or 'About Oracle' or whatever. (^^)

1. Your frustration about Oracle Syntax.
; I felt the same when I first use MS-based SQL-related products such as SQL-server and Access etc because I was too much used to Oracle SQL for years before. For example when you need outer join between two tables, the only thing you should do with Oracle is to use '(+)'. But with SQL server you need extra typing for the same result.

I'm not saying Oracle is better. Later I learned such convenient syntaxes in Oracle are another SQL dialects from ANSI-SQL. But I think such Oracle-specific functions or SQL Syntax are really handy when you need. For example 'DECODE' or 'CONNECT BY' are such things.

If you need more information or knowledge about Oracle , let me introduce a couple of books
; The complete Reference Oracle, McGraw-Hill
( It's good for newbies to understand Oracle functions and syntax).
; Oracle Programming with Visual Basic ( Nick Snowdon, Sybex )
Half of this book covers the Concept of Oracle DBMS.

Hope this help for you.

In my case, I use VFP with Oracle mostly for data reporting and OLAP-like functions. VFP is ,as far as I know, the only tool that can locally query cursor that is taken from back-end Server. This is really fantastic one.

Anyway I'm really glad Oracle session began in UT.