Oracle Options and Extensions

A wide variety of options and extensions for Oracle exist. Lets just mention breifly some of them so you at least have a basic idea of what they are.

RAC

Real Application Clusters, formerly Oracle Parallel Server (OPS). Allows for cluster databases.

OLAP

Online Analytical Processing, "provides valuable insight into business operations and markets"

Spatial

Spatial databases store geographical information (GPS coordinates for instance) with records. Using Spatial you can run queries based on geographical parameters. For instance, how many of the given objects in the database are within 50 miles of New York city.

Streams

Information Sharing/Distribution mechanism for replication and integration (Similar but diffrent to DataGuard)

Ultra Search

A feature of Oracle Collaboration Suite, built on Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server, is a Web-based, "out-of-the-box" search solution that provides search across multiple repositories.

Text

Oracle Text can perform linguistic analysis on documents, as well as search text using a variety of strategies including keyword searching, context queries, Boolean operations, pattern matching, mixed thematic queries, HTML/XML section searching, and so on. It can render search results in various formats including unformatted text, HTML with term highlighting, and original document format. Oracle Text supports multiple languages and uses advanced relevance-ranking technology to improve search quality. Nifty.

interMedia

Enables efficent management and retrieval of images, audio and video data, including the ability to automate metadata extraction and basic image proccessing of most popular multimedia formats.

All of these features (and more) are included in Oracle Enterprise Edition, with the exception of RAC (and RAC extensions) which are Options. RAC is, however, present in the Standard Edition of Oracle. The basic breakdown of Oracle editions is:

Lite Edition

Complete software for building, deploying, and managing mobile database applications.

Personal Edition

Full-featured version for individuals, compatible with the entire Oracle Database family. The features of Personal are identical to the Enterprise Edition.

Standard Edition One

Two-processor version of Standard Edition at an attractive entry-level price.

Standard Edition

Four-processor version of Oracle Database 10g, including full clustering support.

Enterprise Edition

Industry-leading performance, scalability, and reliability for OLTP, decision support, and content management. The whole enchilada.