Overview, Editions, and Features of Oracle Database

By Sandeep Jaiswal | Last Updated: November 25, 2018 Previous       Next

In this article, we will cover the overview, editions, and features of the Oracle database. We have already discussed data, database, DBMS, and RDBMS in the previous tutorial.

What is Oracle Database?

Oracle database is a relational database management system. It produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation (Larry Ellison) which formed in 1977 and product started from Oracle v2 on 1979 to Oracle 18c on 2018.

It used for running online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and mixed (OLTP & DW) database workloads.

Following are the four editions of the Oracle database.

1. Enterprise Edition: It is the most robust and secure edition. It offers all features, including superior performance and security.
2. Standard Edition: It provides the base functionality for users that do not require Enterprise Edition robust package.
3. Express Edition (XE): It is the lightweight, free and limited Windows, and Linux edition.
4. Oracle Lite: It is designed for mobile devices.
5. select * from v$version; to know the edition and version.

Oracle database runs on the most major platforms like Windows, UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS.

In 11g, G stands for Grid, as in 12c, C stands for cloud and in 9i, i stand for the internet.

What is in Oracle Grid computing technology?

1: Automatic Storage Management (ASM). — Storage Structure

2: Real Application Clusters (RAC). – Multiple Instances & One Storage. (Started with 9i in 2001)

3: Application Server Clusters.

4: Enterprise Manager Grid Control. — Managing multiple databases.

There are lots of benefits of Grid infrastructure:

• Low Cost
• High quality of services
• Easy to manage.

New Features in Oracle Database 11g

1- DDL_LOCK_TIMEOUT parameter indicates the number of seconds a DDL command should wait for the locks to become available before throwing the resource busy error message.

ALTER SESSION SET ddl_lock_timeout=30;

2- Invisible Indexes

3- Query Result Cache

4- Temporary Tablespace Enhancements Oracle 11g has a new view called DBA_TEMP_FREE_SPACE that displays information about temporary tablespace usage.

SELECT * FROM dba_temp_free_space;

Role of Database Administrators (DBA)

1. Installation
2. Configuration
3. Database Design
4. Capacity Planning (Future Storage Requirement)
5. Migration
6. Performance Monitoring
7. Security (User Management)
8. Troubleshooting
9. Databases Backup
10. Data Recovery

Tools for administrating a database

• Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) – Install the DB
• DB Configuration Assistant (DBCA) – Create, Delete and Manage the DB
• DB Upgrade Assistant – Perform Upgradation of DB
• Oracle Net Manager – Configure the Listener & TNS
• Oracle Net Configuration Assistant —
• Oracle Enterprise Manager – Web-based tools to perform DB activity like add TS
• SQL*Plus – commutate with DB by writing queries.
• Recovery Manager (RMAN) – Backup and Recovery
• Data Pump – logical backup (exporting & importing DB Objects like tables, functions etc.)
• SQL*Loader – load the data from flat file (txt, dmp, .sql, )

PS: All the above SQL query tested in Oracle 11g.