APEX

Hello,

We are a startup company that is considering using Apex as the technology that will power our database driven website. The company at present is at the classical "two guys in a garage" stage - there are indeed 2 guys and a garage (there's also a basement).

Both of us use Oracle DB in our dull corporate day jobs and have very decent understanding of PL/SQL and Oracle administration. We'd like to leverage our existing skills and Apex naturally comes as the top technology choice for us. However, we both come from Data Warehousing background - we have never developed a B2C consumer website.

With that in mind we'd like to Apex community members for their opinion on our dilemma:

Background Information
- Cost is a big factor for us. We are financing the company through our personal assets and credit means - all of a sudden the realization that Oracle is a rather expensive piece of software sets in, and Enterprise Edition that we've always used is not the default option anymore.
- Thus, we plan to use Oracle Standard Edition One with its maximum support of 2 CPUs for the initial project rollout.
- The same box will run Oracle 10G, OHS and Apex at the same time.
- Our application will be a database driven website, somewhat similar in nature to traditional blog sites: users will post and search for text content

Here are the questions:
- How many concurrent users can we handle on a regular 2 processor (2 GHz each) x86 Linux box with 4GB of RAM based on usage scenario described above?
- Is RAC the only option of scaling Apex in case if rapid user growth?
- Does anyone else know of a similar situation - a startup using Oracle and Apex as their technology foundation?

Our primary concern are potential scalability issues that will leave us no choice but purchase additional Oracle licenses that will break our bank.

Traditional technology stack alternatives for Web 2.0 are a combination of open source database (MySQL, PostgreSQL and etc) and a multitude of currently popular web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP and etc. Horizontal scaling of these technologies presents no additional financial issues as all of this infrastructure software is free. However, neither of us have a good handle on these technologies so we'd rather not use them until we have no other choice.

Another reason for not using these web frameworks is the fact that database driven development feels very natural to us - we are very comfortable using stored procedures, triggers; keeping app logic, validation and etc in the DB as opposed to coding all of it in a non-database programming language such as Ruby or Python.

Another reason that we really like Apex is the great and vibrant community that exists on this forum. I.e. we looked at other alternative rapid development tools such as www.activegrid.com - while they look interesting, their community is very small and somewhat inactive...

Your opinion will be highly appreciated - thanks a lot in advance!

Tom