Thanks for responding. I had no idea about these features. Well heck you can say it is better. That would be alright.

I have been living in the open source world and just never had to deal with commercial DBs at this point.

So I agree with your point. A lot of these features are there but up coming developers might not know about it and will always pick open source choices.

I guess PostgreSQL is the direct competitor at the moment and I have only heard good things about, and Oracle is hated by large numbers of developers (for reasons not necessarily related to technical features).