Standby database as reporting server

This message is cross-posted to 2 groups because it involves both SQL Server & Oracle.

I have just read this article:
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in SQL Server 2005 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/evaluate/dwsqlsy.mspx

as says:
> By creating a database view on a database mirror, you can easily create a standby server for high system availability, which serves double duty as a reporting server.

The concept is to offload operational reporting from the transaction databases by using a standby database as the reporting server. My knowledge is that Oracle has standby database for quite some time (a long way ahead actually, standby -> cluster -> grid), but I am not sure whether Oracle uses this standby db server as reporting server or do any OLAP on it.

The Business Intelligence functions in SQL Server 2005 looks like a flexible and affordable solution, but since Oracle db is our enterprise standard, it's unlikely we use SQL Server 2005 as the transaction database in any time soon. Therefore, if we want to apply this paradigm, we will consider SQL Server as BI server plus Oracle as transaction & standby db server. Any comments are highly appreciated. Received on Mon Dec 19 2005 - 02:22:37 CST