Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) produced by Oracle Corporation. It is one of the world’s most popular database management systems (DBMSs).
Oracle Database is often shortened to “Oracle” and sometimes “Oracle DB” or “Oracle RDBMS” (although it’s not the only product from Oracle Corporation).
Oracle Editions
Oracle Database is available in a paid Enterprise Edition (which also includes Standard Edition), and also a free Express Edition.
Oracle Database is available on Windows and Linux. However, it has also been made available on as a VirtualBox appliance, which enables users of other operating systems to install and connect to Oracle. For example, this enables you to install Oracle on a Mac.
Oracle products follow a custom release-numbering and -naming convention. The “c” in current releases (e.g. Oracle Database 21c), stands for “Cloud”. Previous releases (e.g. Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Database) have used suffixes of “g” and “i” which stand for “Grid” and “Internet” respectively.
Advanced Options
There are a number of options that are only available in the Enterprise Edition. These include:
- Oracle Active Data Guard
- Oracle Advanced Analytics
- Oracle Advanced Compression
- Oracle Advanced Security
- Oracle Database In-Memory
- Oracle Database Vault
- Oracle TimesTen Application-Tier Database Cache
- Oracle Label Security
- Oracle Multitenant
- Oracle On-line Analytical Processing
- Oracle Partitioning
- Oracle Real Application Clusters
- Oracle RAC One Node
- Oracle Real Application Testing
- Oracle Spatial and Graph
Oracle Data Models
Oracle also provides a range of standards-based, pre-built data warehouse database schemas with associated analytic models and dashboards for specific industries.
The following schemas are available in Oracle Database:
- Airline Data Model
- Communications Data Model
- Retail Data Model
- Utilities Data Model
Oracle Enterprise Manager
Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM or EM) is a set of web-based tools that allows you to manage Oracle Database.
OEM enables centralised monitoring, administration, and life cycle management for the complete Oracle infrastructure, including systems running Oracle and non-Oracle technologies.
OEM includes three releases:
- Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control. For managing Oracle databases.
- Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Server Control. Web based tool for managing the Oracle Application Server.
- Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. For managing lots of databases and application servers in a grid solution.
Is it “Oracle Database” or just “Oracle”?
Oracle Database is often shortened to “Oracle” and sometimes “Oracle RDBMS” or “Oracle DB”.
However, this is potentially confusing depending on the context it is being used. Oracle Corporation is also often shortened to just “Oracle”.
Also, Oracle Database is not the only database solution that Oracle Corporation provides. Oracle Corporation also produces MySQL and Oracle NoSQL Database, as well as various other database products, including data warehousing and big data solutions.
So, actual usage should depend on the context. As long as everyone understands what exactly is meant by “Oracle” then there shouldn’t be any confusion.