Re: Slightly off-topic question
Performance wise, Oracle is hghly configurable and tunable for your specific load and if you pay a lot of money for it and also pay a lot of money to your DBAs, developers and infrastructure then it can stand up to some pretty heavy work. They are also leaders with transactional DB performance innovations which other vendors take time to catch up with.
But these requirements are actually quite rare and I believe more than 90% of applications of Oracle could have been done with SQL Server or Postgre or others.
