I'm only well-informed enough to know I'm ignorant and stupid.
I'm happy to hear that "...beyond what anyone has tried with PG so
far" are "fightin' words". Makes me even more confident to recommend
PG and to hope Bitzi will be the last project I choose Oracle for.
The PG FAQ notes that 60 gigabyte databases "exist". For Oracle, that
size is routine, and Bitzi will be much larger. AFAICT PG doesn't
have any support for replication/failover/clustering and the like.
Oracle is simply proven to scale to the levels Bitzi expects in the
fairly short term, while PG isn't (that isn't to say PG can't scale to
those levels now, or perhaps next version, but I'll let someone else
be the test case). FWIW, I wouldn't have considered SQL Server for
something the scale of Bitzi either. Not that I could stand working
with Windows anyway...
Oracle Intermedia is also a really nice feature to have.
In the slightly longer term, a RDBMS may not be the right architecture
for persisting and querying metatdata at all (consider that AFAIK none
of the major web search engines are backed by a RDBMS). But for now
web/db development sure is easy.
And yeah, Oracle licenses are pretty exorbitant. That's life. At
least we don't have any need for Oracle applications or consultants.
I've heard tales from the recent dotcom implosion of startups having
burned through the majority of their VC money on the same.
