The older version of our app is one of those that supports either a Oracle or SQL Server back end. This is not the first time where I've either read or head someone say it is impossible to have any application that does this efficiently. This isn't the case here. From what I have seen it appears to come down to the development platform when it comes to our app. In the 90's our app was written in a language called CET BASIC. You may not be familiar with it but it was/is a great full featured dev platform that we carried over from THEOS OS when we went to Windows.

Performance was very good for both Oracle or a SQL server back end. Then we went to a VB based dev platform. The SQL Server back end was still very fast while the Oracle back end lagged in ways that I sometimes found unacceptable. This speed issue had nothing to do with indexes or any other tuning issue. It seemed to me it was related to the data access tools used to get the data out of Oracle. I could verify that the Oracle server was practically asleep waiting for request from the app. I'm not a VB programmer but I always kind of thought Microsoft intentionally wanted access to any DB besides SQL Server to be slower. I have no proof of that specific claim but I have results from testing.