>> I think most Oracle installs are from the days ram was limited
Could you explain ?
Personally I use Oracle (and hopefully one day PG) because it gives me guarantees on data integrity and these guarantees help me to think about my programs more easily.
Oracle started before microcomputers (PCs) were anything but toys. In 1983, they were multiplatform: mainframes and minicomputers. a 1983 minicomputer might have 2 CPUs, each good for 2 MIPS, 8 MB of RAM and primary storage of as much as a gigabyte or two of disks.
In the early 2000s, a serious database machine -- say, a Sun E10000 - had up to 64 CPUs, running at 400-500MHz each, 64 GB of RAM, and a huge cabinet full of disks.
Now you can call up a SuperMicro VAR and order a 64-core AMD EPYC server with 2TB of RAM and 4 TB of NVMe drives, that talks to other machines over a 100Gb/s ethernet, for a price around the same as a used Tesla S85.
If your database is under 2TB, it all fits in RAM on commodity hardware, where commodity is defined as "anyone with a credit card can order it without even talking to sales".
Could you explain ?
Personally I use Oracle (and hopefully one day PG) because it gives me guarantees on data integrity and these guarantees help me to think about my programs more easily.