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This chapter is your first one on your Oracle Database 10g journey. From here on out, we will walk you through the skills that you need to begin working with the Oracle Database 10g. We'll begin at the core of this product, with the fundamentals of a database. This chapter will also help you form an understanding of the contents of your database and prepare you to move into the complex areas of Oracle Database 10g technology.
Oracle Database 10g—the latest offering from a software giant in northern California. Perhaps you have heard a lot of hype about Oracle Database 10g, perhaps not. Regardless of your experience, 10g is a rich, full-featured software intended to revolutionize the way many companies do their database business. Database you say—now there's a word you hear all the time! In a nutshell, a database is an electronic collection of information designed to meet a handful of needs:
1. Databases provide one-stop shopping for all your data storage requirements, be they in diverse areas such as human resources, finance, inventory, or sales and then some. The database contains any amount of data, from the small to the huge. Data volumes in excess of many hundreds of gigabytes are commonplace in this day and age, where a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
2. Databases must provide mechanisms to retrieve data quickly as applications interact with their contents. It is one thing to store tax information for the 300 million citizens of a country, but it's another kettle of fish to retrieve that data, as required, in a short time period.
3. Databases allow the sharing of corporate data such that personnel data is shared amongst one's payroll, benefits, and pension systems. A familiar adage in the database industry is ''write once, read many." Databases are a manifestation of that saying—one's name, address, and other tombstone personnel information are stored in one place and read by as many systems requiring these details.
There is a great deal of academic interest in the database industry, the theory of the relational database being founded in relational algebra. As data is entered into and stored in the Oracle Database 10g, the relationships it has to other data are defined as well. This allows the assembling of required data as applications run. These relationships can be described in plain English for a fictitious computer parts store as follows:
Each geographical location within which the store does business is uniquely identified by a quad_id.
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