What is ORACLE ?

Oracle is a dataBase used for storing large amount of data. It was developed in the year 1977 by Larry Ellison and two co-workers for software development Lab(SDL) who were the original developers of oracle. The Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle RDBMS or simply as Oracle) is a relational database management system (RDBMS) produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. As of 2010, Oracle has been a major presence in database computing for many years. Getting Started with Oracle: The concept of the relational database was first described around 1970 by Dr. Edgar F. Codd .Oracle database helps in achieving reliable, flexible, secured and cost effective way to manage information and applications. Oracle offers high performance and scalability, because all computing resources can be flexibly allocated to applications as n In oracle the logical and physical structures are separate and thus this helps in physical storage of data can be managed without affecting the access to logical storage structures. Oracle is a major database which along with its added features passes the ACID test, which is important in insuring the integrity of data. Oracle is very much suited for enterprise computing and large database applications because of the following: Oracle provides greater Performance and scalability

Helps in achieving greater reliability. That is in other words continuous availability of data and applications. Have many features for maintaining the security of data.

Oracle has advanced integration features that allow applications and data to run anywhere in the network and thus offering distributed network. ORACLE consists of many tools that allow one to create an application with ease and flexibility. Several of the more useful features available to ORACLE application developers are integrity constraints, stored procedures and packages, database triggers, cost-based optimizer, shared SQL, locking and sequences and some more are namely Automatic Storage Management: Oracle has in it Automatic Storage Management also called as ASM in short which helps in simplifying the administration of Oracle database files. Oracle Scheduler: Oracle Scheduler helps in scheduling and performs various IT tasks. Table space: The main feature of oracle is that the table space in it, helps in extracting data files from database and move or copy them to another location or even put them in another database by the concept of Transportable Table spaces in Oracle.

Oracle is available in different forms like namely:

Personal Oracle Oracle Standard Edition Oracle Enterprise Edition Oracle Lite

Let us see what each means in brief. Personal Oracle: It is a database ideal for single users and is used to develop code for implementation on other Oracle multi-user databases. Oracle Standard Edition: Oracle Standard Edition was named Workgroup Server in its first iteration as part of the Oracle7 family and is often simply referred to as Oracle Server. Oracle Standard Edition is available on Windows NT, Netware, and UNIX platforms such as Compaq (Digital), HP/UX, IBM AIX, Linux, and Sun Solaris. The Oracle Standard Edition is useful for small number of users and a smaller database. Oracle Enterprise Edition: This includes additional functionality and is used for larger-scale implementations. Thus it is used for a large number of users or a large database with advanced features for extensibility, performance, and management. Oracle Lite: This is also called as Oracle Mobile and this is used for single users who are using wireless devices. Thus this is used in lightweight database engine for mobile computing on notebooks and handheld devices. The latest version of oracle has full support for polymorphism, inheritance and most all of the OO constructs. Oracle also provides the concept of dimension objects. A dimension object is a description of the hierarchies inherent in the fact table and is used by Oracle to optimize execution plans and thereby helps in achieving higher performance level in the application. The i in version of oracle like oracle 8i was added to denote added functionality supporting Internet deployment in the new version. There are various branches in which one can go into by learning oracle like be a functional consultant, or a Database administrator DBA in short, Oracle PL/SQL Developer Certified Associate designation, Oracle Forms Developer Certified Professional designation and so on.

Advantages:
Oracle has many advantages and features that makes it popular and thereby makes it as the world's largest enterprise software company. Oracle comes with new versions with new features implemented in new version while the features of earlier versions still being maintained. One important aspect is Oracle databases tend to be backwards compatible. Also when Oracle releases a new version, their documentation contains a list of all the features new to that version thus makes it user friendly for one to learn the new features.

Oracle takes a lead role because of some of the following reasons: Oracle is used for almost all large application and one of the main applications in which oracle takes its major presence is banking. In fact ten of the worlds top 10 banks run Oracle applications this is because oracle offers a powerful combination of technology and comprehensive, pre-integrated business applications, including key functionality built specifically for banks. Some similar databases like Sybase, SQL-Server one have facilities for using loops, conditions, arrays and so on in a program and also facilities like cursors and temp tables but all this would be used in a convoluted fashion which are very slow and resource consuming operations. The operations are not implemented as in Oracle which is efficient enough. Also with the features available in oracle with the earlier versions in market the oracle company keeps upgrading and releasing new products into market, new versions releases which serves better than the earlier versions and thus the performance is improved much in later versions and thereby retaining the market growth and thus proves greater satisfaction to the customers using this technology. Thus the advantage of a higher version is that one would have more features and better capabilities. For instance oracle 8i version has many new features which helped users namely like with oracle 8i one could run Java in the database, had features like new features on partitioning to support large database and so on. With the next version 9i oracle had these facilities maintained and had more new facilities added to it namely like new features added to help the DBA to handle change database configuration and so on. Oracle is a database that responds very well with excellent performance in demanding environments. Oracle is a major database which along with its added features passes the ACID test, which is important in insuring the integrity of data. This is very important because data is the heart of any system in organization. A reliable and adequate database system has the following properties: Atomicity: That is Results of a transaction's execution are either all committed or all rolled back. Consistency: The database is transformed from one valid state to another valid state. Illegal transactions aren't allowed and, if an integrity constraint can't be satisfied then the transaction is rolled back. Isolation: The results of a transaction are invisible to other transactions until the transaction is complete thus increasing the security on data. Durability: Once committed (completed), the results of a transaction are permanent and survive future system and media failures and thus ensuring maintenance and protection of data.

All the above are well maintained by Oracle database. The latest version oracle 10g has many features and one new feature is the introduction of recycle bin. This option when enabled could be used by users just like Windows recycle bin or Mac Trash. Dropped tables go "into" the recycle bin, and can be restored from the recycle bin. One of the main advantage of oracle over other databases is in its recent version oracle has the concept of Flashback technology. That is we all know that data is the heart of any application or organization and thus this requires careful maintenance. But sometimes application outage can occur and mostly DBA claim the reasons for this as hardware failure and apart from this the reason would be human errors like accidental deletion of valuable data, deleting the wrong data, or dropping the wrong table. So it is very essential to take care of such situation and this is done in oracle's latest technology called flash introduced in its latest version. By Flash technology it helps in recovery by working just on the changed data. Thus Flashback provides an

Efficient recovery from human errors Faster database recovery Helps in simplifying the management and administration processes and so on. Thus oracle has many advantages and features that give security, protection, maintenance, reliability and performance on operation of data and with this in addition its main popularity and stability is because it keeps on adding new features which makes it user friendly for users and popularly used database among organizations.