Re: Oracle licence question

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

And you pay a lot extra for the OLAP engine with Oracle.

Can you write MDX in standard edition?
Do you have a reporting engine and client tool with standard edition? Does your engine supplied with the standard edition deal with aggregations of dimensional data or do you have to code it all yourself?

The extensions both products give you in SQL for BI are limited compared to what OLAP gives you.

And my point to the post and the thread is DA stated this...

>>> But if you compare equals ... Oracle Standard
>>> Edition to SQL Server Enterprise it is not. And even with this
>>> comparison Oracle has a far richer feature set

Which just is not true.

-- 
Tony Rogerson
SQL Server MVP
http://sqlserverfaq.com - free video tutorials


"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend_at_comcast.net> wrote in message 
news:1a-dnR8KO99Zi5_ZRVn-tw_at_comcast.com...


> 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.