Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Oracle Development has developed releases using a single source code model for the
core family of database products since 1983. While each database implementation in‐
cludes some operating-system-specific source code at very low levels in order to better
leverage specific platforms, the interfaces that users, developers, and administrators deal
with for each version are consistent. This development strategy enables Oracle to focus
on implementing new features only once across its product set.
The introduction of Oracle's engineered systems, Exadata storage, and the Exadata
Storage Server software enabled Oracle to optimize the database for specific hardware
server and storage configurations. Today, Oracle offers a family of engineered systems
capable of running the Oracle Database. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine was the
most popular engineered system as this edition of the topic was published. The Oracle
SuperCluster is a general purpose platform also featuring Exadata storage (and some
general purpose storage) and is designed to run both the Oracle Database and Oracle
Fusion Middleware. The Oracle Database Appliance is a two-node configuration de‐
signed to be a smaller departmental server. The Exalogic Elastic Cloud system is opti‐
mally designed to run Oracle's Fusion Middleware and often is deployed as a middle-
tier server in front of Exadata, but occasionally is deployed with the Oracle Database
also running on it. Neither the Oracle Database Appliance nor Exalogic Elastic Cloud
support Exadata storage.
Summary of Oracle Database Features
The Oracle Database is a broad and deep product. To give some initial perspective, we
begin describing Oracle with a high-level overview of the basic areas of functionality.
By the end of this portion of the chapter, you will have orientation points to guide you
in exploring the topics in the rest of this topic.
To give some structure to the broad spectrum of the Oracle Database, we've organized
our initial discussion of these features and complementary software components into
the following sections:
• Database application development features
• Database connection features
• The role of Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Distributed database features
• Data movement features
• Database performance features
• Managing the Oracle Database
• Database security features
