W.r.t to AIMS.
I'm sorry to say it but, as a person who (with 20+ years of solid IT/Systems integration behind him) , the underlying database of AIMS (Btrieve) is crap - and perhaps worse still is the totally non-relational design that AIMS have placed within it ! (you'd hope that as a professional software house that they'd know better)
Now I can't comment on their Oracle or MSQL implementations - but they can't of changed the DB design that much - or else they'd have to totally rewrite major parts of the application code to handle any new database design.
Ok, from the end-users perspective it's nice to use, but from a systems integration point of view it's pants !
Ps. For what it's worth, we're looking at Geneva - which has seemingly been much better thought through & designed.