Re: Oracle licence question

Tony Rogerson wrote:
> Its not what it says here:
> http://www.oracle.com/database/product_editions.html

Yes it does say it there. What part are you confused by ?

>
> And what about the BI stuff?
>

Tony - this is known to most of the people on this group already, so this discussion will be anathema to them, but for completeness, let me explain what is going on

Both SQLServer and Oracle have multiple data engines in their products - a SQL engine, and an OLAP engine.

Oracle's SQL engine is stronger than SQLServers SQL engine in terms of BI, in that there are (standard, by the way) SQL Extensions that support BI activities such as analysis, aggregation and modelling.

See
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14223/aggreg.htm#i1007462 http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14223/analysis.htm#i1007779 and
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14223/sqlmodel.htm#sthref1855 for a discussion of what these are.

In case you don't have an OTN account, I've summarized these capabilities below

ROLLUP Extension to GROUP BY
CUBE Extension to GROUP BY
GROUPING Functions
GROUPING SETS Expression
Ranking Functions
Windowing Aggregate Functions
Reporting Aggregate Functions
LAG/LEAD Functions
FIRST/LAST Functions
Inverse Percentile Functions
Hypothetical Rank and Distribution Functions Linear Regression Functions
Linear Algebra
Frequent Itemsets
WIDTH_BUCKET Function
User-Defined Aggregate Functions
Data Densification for Reporting
Time Series Calculations on Densified Data

These BI capabilities in the SQL engine are in ALL editions of Oracle

SQLServer doesn't have many of these equivalent capabilities in the SQL engine, so SQLServer users tend to go to the OLAP engine in SQLServer for equivalents.

The same is not true for Oracle users. The Oracle OLAP engine provides a whole new level of BI capabilities over and above what the Oracle SQL engine provides. Some of these capabilities overlap with what the SQLServer OLAP engine provides. So it sort of looks like this

Microsoft <---SQL---><--OLAP-->
Oracle <-------SQL------><----OLAP---->

Oracle charges for it's OLAP capabilities, SQLServer does not. But to characterize Oracle as not having BI capabilities in all editions of the database is misleading. Received on Sun Feb 26 2006 - 14:59:48 CST