I’ll give you 10 quick features of Oracle 10g, that I seriously doubt that we will even see by the time Progress gets to version 15.
1) database reorgs online (the equivelent of a dump & load online)
2) Database level, Table level, row level or transaction level rewind. (not rollback – you can literally rewind the database, without restoring from backup.)
3) Oracle has a Recycle Bin. You can reclaim objects that are dropped, etc.
4) Resource Management (CPU, Disk I/O, etc), which still can not be done in Progress
5) SQL Tuning advisor (when was the last time a Progress database told you how to fix your code)
6) Almost all Administration is done via the web based database console (free with the database license – and NO, Oracle is NOT more expensive than Progress anymore)
7) The database has a job scheduler (a replacement for CRON), including job chaining
8) You can designate which tables you might want to cache in memory upon database startup
9) Last I checked, Progress has 57 database parameters for configuration and performance, 7 of which are dynamic. Oracle has 256 such paramaters, of which 146 are dynamic.
10) Automatic Storage Management
As of 12/24/07
Company Market Cap.
Progress 1.2 Billion
Sybase 2.37 Billion
Oracle 116.91 Billion
Microsoft 342.22 Billion