Hi Eric and JP,
I certainly do not want to start a discussion in the form of recrimination here. I am very pleased of the JMP team support. Regarding FileMaker, the important thing for me is to be able to work around the problem by removing the semicolon and to have shared the trick.
You are correct in regard to the offer somewhat more limited for databases manager in Mac OS's world.. Personally, I mostly use FileMaker for my research for its design flexibility (and Rapid Development) which is more important for me than the raw power. I nevertheless manages with great efficiency (with FileMaker Server) some databases with hundred of tables, thousands of fields and millions of records. I also use SQLite (a user) and especially PosGres (PostGIS server) for geographic data.
The ODBC drivers are particularly capricious for francophones like me because of the accents. You absolutely have to proscribe accents and spaces in field's titles!
Thanks again,
Claude