>I'm currently in the final stages of a project using an Oracle back-end running on an NT box with Quad Pentium 500s, 1/2 a Gig of RAM, and RAID 5. After mucking around with pinning objects into Oracle's shared-pool, and sizing the shared-pool appropriately, the application is BLAZING fast (I had tremendous support from an Oracle 'Guru' in getting things set-up). The right tools for the job.... etc and blah blah blah.

With NT, you can do a lot of tuning - and with Oracle as well. As you said, tuning makes all the difference, and with NT, tuning is possible, as is exploiting multiple processors. Win9x doesn't cut it if you have the budget for big Wintel iron. If you put a big enough engine on it, even a brick will fly. You can strap a much bigger engine on NT, and if you need more than one box will accomodate, there's always clustering...all it takes is money!