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Get a Head Start On Your Oracle Learning with this Oracle Tutorial

This Oracle tutorial can only give you a flavour of the database and its tools but will provide links to other resources to enable you to research further.

A Brief History

Released in 1979 and beating IBM to market by 2 years, Oracle was the first commercial database management system to implement the relational data model developed by Dr. E.F. Codd, an IBM researcher, in 1970. (See "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" for the full text of his paper).

What was the significance of this?

Commercial database management systems had appeared in the late 1960s/early 1970s but were based on either a hierarchical (tree-structured) or network (CODASYL) data model in both of which the physical and logical data models were inextricably linked. This made them inflexible and unable to handle the inevitable business changes.

The relational data model, and therefore relational databases, solved this problem by the separation of the logical and physical representations of data. This makes relational database management systems relatively quick and easy to modify in order to adapt to changed business environments.

Evolution of Oracle

Since its release Oracle has constantly evolved to take advantage of advances in technology and ever expanding business requirements for data storage and is now an object-relational hybrid - a relational database management system with object-oriented features.

These advances in technology have also enabled the storage of unstructured data such as spreadsheets, documents, XML data, geospatial data and multi-media data either in the database or in the file system but accessible from the database.

More than just a database

In the beginning Oracle was just a database but it has now grown to include:
  • application development software for data entry and/or reporting including Forms, JDeveloper, BI Publisher, Application Express
  • an application server to enable multi-tier systems
  • clustering software (known as Real Application Clusters) to enable load balancing and improve database availability
  • grid management software to enable Oracle to run on multiple, low-cost commodity servers and storage units instead of one big, expensive high-end server. This reduces costs whilst increasing database reliability. If one unit out of many fails the impact will be small, however if your only server/storage unit fails, then obviously that is a big problem.
  • customisable/configurable applications such as the E-Business suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, Hyperion etc, some of which have been acquired in recent years
  • enterprise portal development software
The company has also produced a version of Linux and their own server virtualization software - Oracle VM - based on the open source Xen(TM) hypervisor technology (which enables multiple operating systems to run on the same physical server simultaneously).

Accessing Your Data

Access to the database is via SQL (Structured Query Language) statements embedded in C/Fortran/Java/etc programs or via special low-level libraries specific to each language or entered directly into Oracle's SQL*Plus (a command-line interpreter) or SQL Developer (a gui, multi-purpose tool).

Oracle also comes with its own programming language - PL/SQL. Programs written in PLSQL have the advantage that they can be stored in the database and are therefore tightly integrated with the database as well as being able to take advantage of the extra resources that a server usually has.

Further Reading

You should by now appreciate that Oracle is a big subject - far too big to cover in a short Oracle tutorial like this. To learn more have a look at our SQL and PL/SQL tutorials (as a detailed discussion of either of these is outside the scope of this Oracle tutorial) or follow the links to the other resources in the main body of our Oracle tutorial.

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