Oracle Workspace Manager

Today, I came across the Oracle Workspace Manager and almost literally stood up and said “wow!”. Has anyone out there used this beast? Assuming it has good performance characteristics, it sounds fantastic for the kinds of things I’m working on.

The brief summary, for those who don’t feel like reading the whole datasheet, is that Workspace Manager provides row-level version control for your database, will branching/merging capabilities and flexibility in terms of which tables are versioned and how they are versioned. The “how” can be keeping all changes to a row, or keeping just the most recent change within the workspace. Using the latter, you could just hold on to periodic milestones of the data.

I guess there really is a reason that Oracle costs big bucks and MySQL and PostgreSQL are free. MySQL works great for a great many applications, but there’s probably no substitute for Oracle in places where Workspace Manager are called for. (Does anyone know of other databases that have this kind of versioning?)