Hello,
As you mentioned in your question, working with Oracle does not exclude the jBASE layer.
Meaning, T24 will still write, read, update and delete the jBASE tables, however a driver will translate these operations to Oracle.
For example, a write operation will be performed to the jBASE table, the driver will take over, translate the jBASE record to XML and then write the XML string to an Oracle table.
A read operation will be performed from T24 to jBASE which in turn will go to Oracle, read the record, the result XML will be translated to jBASE format and sent to T24.
As you can see there are extra 2 moves (XML translation) and writing/reading Oracle table.
As far as I know in terms of performance, working with Oracle will need more cpu power and more disk space.
At best you will get same performance as it was with jBASE only.