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Theoretically, writing an Oracle driver for Drupal 7 is possible. As the SQLite driver proves, you have quite enough points where you can massage the input/output to make the ancient vestige that's Oracle and the leading tech that is Drupal work together. Yes there are issues which would make this easier, but I am firm it's possible. A few important questions remain: where should this driver live? If in core, are patches going to be held because they fail on Oracle? Who is going to maintain this driver? If it's contrib, again the maintainership question raises even more sharper because we know how contrib usually lacks peer review... Not for the first time, we are facing more a human resources problem than a technical problem.
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Why is using Oracle any better than using MySQL/PostGrSQL/SQLite, etc?
Is this not a case of providing a service "just because we can"?
Some people will only run a database with $10,000 license fees. If Drupal supports that database, then people with such requirements might run Drupal (since they can now pay for commercial support contracts for Drupal too now). So it's 'better' for IT departments in large corporations with a lot more money than sense.
I don't think core should support any database which isn't freely available. Only a tiny fraction of core developers have PostgreSQL installed, and if they do, rarely do they test patches on it. I've tested about three on postgres I think, and that took me only about 10 minutes to get up and running with. The natural answer to this is "we'll run a test slave with it" - but then as chx says, are we going to stop committing patches because they fail on Oracle? If we do, that'll probably coincide with when I stop reviewing them.
FWIW, Oracle has a "free" (as in "no cost but closed source") version which might facilitate setting up a test slave.
On top of what Catch says about support and corporate IT departments there are cases where you want to get information from an outside data source and that may be an Oracle database.
Direct support means I can get that information with db_query.
It's great to be incorporated into drupal oracle, this creates many opportunities to improve our drupal.
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