does Oracle Database compare?
See the Test Center review, “Oracle Database 11g shoots the moon.” ] Change Data Capture and Lookup Cache will be popular with DBAs who want to speed up ETL (Extract, Transformation, and Load) processes, as will the pipeline improvements in Integration Services, enabling it to push data much faster. Data Compression, PowerShell integration, and Policy-Based Management, not to mention Server Groups, should make a big splash in almost any environment. Just keep in mind that the benefits you get from Data Compression (which works at the page level, replacing repeating data with lookup pointers) will depend on the nature of the data in your table and how it’s ordered. Backup Compression is also new in SQL Server 2008. Although the compression itself works well, the feature has too many limitations (including supporting only Enterprise Edition) to be effective in an enterprise setting. Another compression feature, called Sparse Columns, allows you to store nulls without taking up physical s