Jim Russell (3/14/2008)
RE CTEs. I love them and use them, but I had gotten the impression that they too were a MS nonstandard extension. Are they part of the SQL standard and are they available in Oracle. (Same syntax?)
They are ANSI standard. They were not in SQL-92, but they are in SQL:2003, described as part of "7.13 ". The standard does seam to have a different way to express recursive CTEs though.
I have no idea if Oracle implements them.