You may (or may not) have noticed that Oracle 11g got released recently. One of the new features that caught my eye is discussed in these two posts by Seth Grimes and Doug Henschen on the Intelligent Enterprise blog:
Seems like Oracle have used a new OLAP engine (ie not Express or Essbase) as the basis for managing large numbers of materialised views. When I first read this I thought the kind of feature that only a die-hard relational-database-lovin’ OLAP-denier could ever get excited about, but then I realised that that’s probably the point. It would be cool if SQL Server could use Analysis Services in the same way, and if it could it would open the eyes of a lot of new people to the power of Analysis Services.
