Introduction

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Objectives

In this lesson, you gain an understanding of the relational database management system (RDBMS) and the object relational database management system (ORDBMS). You are also introduced to the following:

• SQL statements that are specific to Oracle
• iSQL*Plus, which is an environment used for executing SQL statements and for formatting and reporting purposes

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Goals of the Course

This course offers you an introduction to Oracle Database 10g database technology. In this class, you learn the basic concepts of relational databases and the powerful SQL programming language. This course provides the essential SQL skills that enable you to write queries against single and multiple tables, manipulate data in tables, create database objects, and query metadata.

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Oracle10g Features

The Oracle10g release offers a comprehensive high-performance infrastructure, including:

Scalability from departments to enterprise e-business sites
Robust, reliable, available, and secure architecture
One development model; easy deployment options
Leverage an organizations current skillset throughout the Oracle platform (including SQL, PL/SQL, Java, and XML)
One management interface for all applications
Industry standard technologies; no proprietary lock-in

In addition to providing the benefits listed above, the Oracle10g release contains the database for the grid. Grid computing can dramatically lower the cost of computing, extend the availability of computing resources, and deliver higher productivity and quality.

The basic idea of grid computing is the notion of computing as a utility, analogous to the electric power grid or the telephone network. As a client of the grid, you do not care where your data is or where your computation is done. You want to have your computation done and to have your information delivered to you when you want it. From the server side, grid is about virtualization and provisioning. You pool all your resources together and provision these resources dynamically based on the needs of your business, thus achieving better resource utilization at the same time.

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Oracle10g

The three grid-infrastructure products of the Oracle10g release are:

Oracle Database 10g
Oracle Application Server 10g
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control

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Oracle Database 10g

Oracle Database 10g is designed to store and manage enterprise information. Oracle Database 10g cuts management costs and provides a high quality of service. Reduced configuration and management requirements and automatic SQL tuning have significantly reduced the cost of maintaining the environment.

Oracle Database 10g contributes to the grid infrastructure products of the Oracle 10g release. Grid computing is all about computing as a utility. If you are a client, you need not know where your data resides and which computer stores it. You should be able to request information or computation on your data and have it delivered to you.

Oracle Database 10g manages all your data. This is not just the object relational data that you expect an enterprise database to manage. It can also be unstructured data such as:

Spreadsheets
Word documents
PowerPoint presentations
XML
Multimedia data types like MP3, graphics, video, and more

The data does not even have to be in the database. Oracle Database 10g has services through which you can store metadata about information stored in file systems. You can use the database server to manage and serve information wherever it is located.

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Oracle Application Server 10g

Oracle Application Server 10g provides a complete infrastructure platform for developing and deploying enterprise applications, integrating many functions including a J2EE and Web services run-time environment, an enterprise portal, an enterprise integration broker, business intelligence, Web caching, and identity management services.

Oracle Application Server 10g adds new grid computing features, building on the success of Oracle9i Application Server, which has hundreds of customers running production enterprise applications.

Oracle Application Server 10g is the only application server to include services for all the different server applications that you might want to run, including:

Portals or Web sites
Java transactional applications
Business intelligence applications

It also provides integration among users, applications, and data throughout your organization.

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Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is the complete, integrated, central management console and underlying framework that automates administrative tasks across sets of systems in a grid environment. With Oracle Grid Control, you can group multiple hardware nodes, databases, application servers, and other targets into single logical entities. By executing jobs, enforcing standard policies, monitoring performance and automating many other tasks across a group of targets instead of on many systems individually, Grid Control enables scaling with a growing grid.

Software Provisioning

With Grid Control, Oracle 10g automates installation, configuration, and cloning of Application Server 10g and Database 10g across multiples nodes. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a common framework for software provisioning and management, enabling administrators to create, configure, deploy, and utilize new servers with new instances of the application server and database as they are needed.

Application Service Level Monitoring

Oracle Grid Control views the availability and performance of the grid infrastructure as a unified whole, as a user would experience it, rather than as isolated storage units, processing boxes, databases, and application servers.

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About the Oracle Server

The Oracle server supports both the relational and object relational models.

The Oracle server extends the data-modeling capabilities to support an object relational database model that brings object-oriented programming, complex data types, complex business objects, and full compatibility with the relational world.

It includes several features for improved performance and functionality of online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, such as better sharing of run-time data structures, larger buffer caches, and deferrable constraints. Data warehouse applications benefit from enhancements such as parallel execution of insert, update, and delete operations; partitioning; and parallel-aware query optimization. Operating within the Network Computing Architecture (NCA) framework, the Oracle model supports client/server and Web-based applications that are distributed and multitiered.

For more information about the relational and object relational model, see the Database Concepts manual.

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Oracle Internet Platform

To develop an e-commerce application, you need a product that can store and manage the data, a product that can provide a run-time environment for your applications implementing business logic, and a product that can monitor and diagnose the application after it is integrated. The Oracle 10g products that we have been discussing provide all the necessary components to develop your application.

Oracle offers a comprehensive high-performance Internet platform for e-commerce and data warehousing. The integrated Oracle Internet Platform includes everything needed to develop, deploy, and manage Internet applications, including these three core pieces:

Browser-based clients to process presentation
Application servers to execute business logic and serve presentation logic to browser-based clients
Databases to execute database-intensive business logic and serve data

Oracle offers a wide variety of the most advanced graphical user interface (GUI)driven development tools to build business applications, as well as a large suite of software applications for many areas of business and industry. Oracle Developer Suite includes tools to develop forms and reports and to build data warehouses. Stored procedures, functions, and packages can be written using SQL, PL/SQL, or Java.