Relational Database front end, or Investment Tracking Application?

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

I've been trying out the commertially available investment tracking
applications for a while now, and have never been satisfied with them.  I
think that I've got all of the information gathered for designing an
investment tracking application that doesn't suck.  We just did a quick
implementation of this using MS Access, and found a couple of design flaws,
which we expected.  From our time in Access, it's not going to be sufficient
for what we need to do, and since we're not at all windows bound, I'm
looking for some suggestions.  What I need to have is some way to talk to a
relational database for the backend, some way of entering data into the
database, and some good way of getting that data back out.  Generically,
Access looked like it would suit our needs, but it's a real pain to work
with, and doesn't have the features that the database guy has become
acustomed to working on the DB2 mainframe at the office.  Does anybody have
suggestions on where I should look for these components?  Specifically, is
there a competitor to MS Access that I can grab that's a part of GNOME, or
at very least, Free as in Freedom?  If not, is there a good set of modules
for accessing a relation database that I can use to build an application?
Thanks,
	Greg