PostreSQL is not necessarily inferior to Oracle here.
Great Bridge recently published benchmark comparisons
between psql and two unnamed commercial database
systems. (Both Oracle and MS require as part of their
license that you agree not to publish any benchmarks
or other performance measurements.) Now, GB is
hardly an unbiased source, but otoh looking over what
they did as a benchmark there's no obvious cheating.
PostgreSQL did fairly well, so it's a reasonable choice.
It definitely qualifies as 'industrial strength' as far as
capabilites, too: great level of concurrency, genuine
transactions, triggers, views, foreign keys, etc.
Its greatest current limitation is its 8- to 30-k limitation
on row size (beyond which you have to go to blobs,
which is not for the fainthearted.) But if you're talking
about mostly transactional data, rather than storing
the html text of articles inside the database, it's
no problem. A soon-to-be-released update (next
month or two) will do away with the row-size limit,
but that's no help if you need to start today.
