Introduction to Oracle
Oracle is a product from Oracle corporation, that provides a relational database management system. Oracle’s RDBMS supports any kind of data models, and has different product editions such as Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, Express Edition, and Personal Edition, among which the user gets to choose the database system depending on their need. Oracle products are scalable and secure, with high performance ability, compared to other databases available in the market.
What is Oracle?
Its database is also known as simply Oracle also. It is a multi-model relational database management system, mainly designed for enterprise grid computing and data warehousing. It is one of the first choices for enterprises for cost-effective solutions for their applications and data management. It supports SQL as a query language to interact with the database.
Currently, its database comes in five different editions based on the features available.
- Standard Edition One: It is suitable for single-server or highly branched business applications with limited features.
- Standard Edition: It delivers all facilities provided in Standard Edition One. In addition, it provides larger machine support and Oracle Real Application clustering service.
- Enterprise Edition: This edition is packed with features like security, performance, scalability, and availability, required for highly-critical applications in which online transaction processing is involved.
- Express Edition: It is an entry-level edition that is free to download, install, manage, develop and deploy.
- Personal Edition: It comes with the same features of Enterprise edition except Oracle Real Application Clustering.
Features of Oracle
An Oracle database offers the following features to meet the requirements of powerful database management:
- Scalability and Performance: Features like Real Application Clustering and Portability make an Oracle database scalable according to the usage. In a multiuser database, it is required to control data consistency and concurrency which are contemplated by Oracle.
- Availability: Real-time applications require high data availability. High performing computing environments are configured to provide all-time data availability. Data is available during the time of planned or unplanned downtimes and failures.
- Backup and Recovery: Its layout complete recovery features to recover data from almost all kinds of failures. In case of failure, the database needs to be recovered within no time for high availability. Unaffected parts of data are available while the affected ones are getting recovered.
- Security: Securing the data is always the top priority. Oracle provides mechanisms to control data access and usage. Implementing authorization and editing user actions can prevent unauthorized access and allow distinct access to the users.
Importance of Oracle
It is among the oldest companies which provide database management solutions. The company has always focused on Enterprise requirements and acknowledged the latest technology trends. That’s why its products are always embellished with new features. For instance, the latest Oracle database 19C is available on Oracle Cloud as well. Oracle offers users to choose from the different database editions which suit their needs in order to provide a cost-effective solution.
Benefits
We have talked about the features of its database. These features give Oracle an edge over other competitors. Now, we will look at the advantages of Oracle.
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1. Performance: It has methodologies and principles to achieve high performance. We can implement performance tuning in its database to retrieve and alter data faster, in order to improve query execution time and hence application operations.
2. Multiple Database: Its database supports managing multiple database instances on a single server. Instance Caging method is provided by Oracle to manage CPU allocations on a server running the database instances. Instance caging works with the database resource manager to manage services over multiple instances.
3. Editions: As we discussed above, about the different editions which are offered by Oracle, it gives benefit to the users to purchase edition as per their application requirements. They can seamlessly update the edition if their requirements change in the future. If you want to learn and do some hands-on Oracle, you can download and install the express edition database which is absolutely free.
4. Clusters: It uses Real Application Clusters to provide a high data availability system. The database with RAC has benefits over traditional database servers :
- Scaling the database over multiple instances.
- Load balancing
- Data redundancy and availability
- Flexible to increase processing capacity
5. Failure Recovery: RMAN (Recovery Manager) is the feature of an Oracle DB which recover or restore the database files during downtimes and outages. It supports online, archived backups and continuous archiving. Users can also SQL* PLUS for recovery, called as user-managed recovery, which is supported by it. There is an export utility available in the database to add user-managed backups.
6. PL/SQL: The database supports PL/SQL extension for procedural programming.
Why do We Use Oracle?
It is a database management software product. A database contains an organized collection of information. A database management system is not only used for storing the data but to effectively manage it and provides high performance, authorized access and failure recovery features. It provides a software solution that is easy to use and manage database operations, from Personal to Enterprise level applications.
Conclusion
We can conclude that Oracle is a powerful database server management software that can serve the requirements of Enterprise level and small level applications as well. It includes almost all the features required to support modern applications and therefore, is widely used.
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