Question : ORACLE vs. MS-SQL

Okay.. I'm sure this is a love / hate topic around here.  

There are a lot of newbie’s with no prior knowledge of either platform who love to revive this on-going battle on SQL vs. ORACLE.  And of course there are a lot of opinions on either side of the fence who are eager to battle it out.

I, on the other hand am not interested in any such debate.  I am a SQL Developer with experience in (mostly) MS-SQL and no experience with ORACLE database.  Lately, I find myself being involved more and more on large-scale production databases and I am considering learning ORACLE in case I may have to use it soon.  

But before I dive into a new platform, I would like to know some reasons to moving onto ORACLE..  
Here is what I'm looking for:

1. Not interested in cost comparison
2. Not interested in UNIX / Windows comparison (or any platform comparison)
3. Not interested in any general benchmarks
4. Not interested in 'overall-package' reasons like how MS offers integrated software, etc.
5. Not looking for the 'multi-platform' speach..  

I am looking for a FEATURE COMPARISON of the two.  

1. What features are available in ORACLE that are not available (at all) in SQL Server (and vice versa)
2. Specific differences in how one feature works differently on one platform vs. the other (such as materialized views / indexed views)
3. Specific performance tuning abilities that one platform offers but not the other (such as hardware-level block-read settings or what not.)


I really would like to know what it is that I am diving into and for what reasons (aside from job security)

- Eyal.

Answer : ORACLE vs. MS-SQL

Don't blame me if I'm wrong, I forgot to mention above but I think you might find SQL server has no support for :

Function based indexes
Star query optimization
Bitmap indexes
Reverse Key indexes
Partitioning
Resource control and memory allocation control
Blocks over 8k

(probably many others too !)