In our Oracle environment, we can see every background process, with it’s own pid and along with the process monitor, (pmon)db writer, (dbwr), log writer, (lgwr), we also have archiving, (arcx), job processing, (j00x) performance and other background processing. I didn’t even grep for the Oracle executable, so you recognize how quickly we can see what is running.
In the SQL Server environment, we only have two processes- our parent process is PID 7 and the child is 9 for SQL Server and nothing to distinguish what they actually are doing. If we decide to use the pmap utility to view what the parent and child process aredoing, we see only sqlservr as the mapping information.
I imagine that things like this will improve over time for SQL Server, but Oracle definitely has a leg up in this regard.