databasin' like a mamma jamma

[luvcraft]

so guys, my department chair wants me to build a gigantic database of all of our department's employees, and associated facilities' employees, current, former, and known-future, including everything from where they went to school to their salaries to the ages and names of their children. This database also needs to be able to be used to generate reports in Windows (either from a Windows application or via a web interface). I also need to be able to keep a history of when each field was changed. So, for instance, if a faculty member leaves and then comes back, I need a history of the dates when we decided the person would be "future faculty", then when we hired them and they became "current faculty", then when they changed to "former faculty", and then when they changed back to "current faculty".

What would be the best software to use for this? It seems to me like it would be too big for Access, and I also don't think that Access can handle the history tracking part.

A caveat is that our systems group is running Microsft SQL, but refuses to run MySQL.