What is Oracle Database?

The Enterprise Database Leader

Oracle Database is a multi-model relational database management system from Oracle Corporation, first released in 1979 and now regarded as the de facto standard for large enterprise systems. It is famous for high availability, security and scalability.

Why Enterprises Choose Oracle

• Scalability: handles terabytes and huge transaction volumes with Real Application Clusters (RAC).
• Security: fine-grained access control, encryption and Data Masking.
• High availability: Data Guard provides standby databases and failover.
• PL/SQL: a powerful procedural language built into the database.
• Analytics: advanced SQL features, partitioning and in-memory options.

Oracle Editions

• Enterprise Edition (EE): the full platform used in big companies.
• Standard Edition (SE): trimmed features for mid-sized deployments.
• Express Edition (XE): free, limited to smaller databases; ideal for learning.
• Free: a newer no-cost developer edition with more power than XE.

Oracle vs MySQL

MySQL is a lightweight open source engine tuned for web workloads. Oracle is a heavyweight enterprise platform with richer features for security, failover, partitioning and procedural logic. For learning SQL and PL/SQL for corporate careers, Oracle is essential.

Key Points

• Oracle is the leading enterprise RDBMS.
• PL/SQL gives you procedural logic inside the database.
• Oracle XE is free to download for learning.
• Enterprise features like RAC and Data Guard drive its popularity.