What does Oracle do that a programmer wouldn't write as compatible with other databases? Just trying to figure out why a product wouldn't be written to work with more things.
Lots of things, really. They don't have a real 'limit' capability that I've found that works in any way like mySQL's.
To mimic MySQL's "SELECT last_name FROM employees LIMIT 50,50" you have to do something like this:
SELECT last_name FROM (SELECT last_name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY last_name) R FROM employees) WHERE R BETWEEN 51 and 100;
Aside from that, it's general operational differences and variations from the SQL spec on a pretty grand scale. The flip side to that though is that most serious Enterprise companies are generally using Oracle already anyway, so it's safe to target Oracle or MS-SQL and know that almost all of your customers will have one or both.
