Oracle Application Development

The word oracle owes its origin to Latin word oracular which means making divine announcements or divining the future which was an ancient practice in Greece. But the modern Oracle is the name of leading software for information management.

Oracle was founded by CEO Lawrence J. Ellison and his associates in 1977 to prove the commercial viability of the relational databases. They proved their point by making an initial investment of $2,000 in a company and generated annual revenue of more than $9.7 billion.

Oracle software specializes in sophisticated relational database products. A database is a collection of data in an organized form. The data may comprise text such as inventory, pictures, graphics, programs or anything that can be stored in a computer in binary form.

A relational database is a collection of data in form of tables and columns. For example, while a table may contain the name of an employee, the column may contain his job address and similar other detail.

A relational database involves collecting the data without disturbing the database tables. The standard application program for relational database is the structured query language or the SQL which is an industry standard. Relational database products such as Oracle 9i are used by Fortune 1,000 corporations and some of the largest websites.

Like Sun Microsystems, Oracle runs its systems on network computers. It is the world’s first software company that has developed and deployed completely internet enabled software products such as database, servers, enterprise business solutions and their support tools.

The international headquarter of Oracle is based in Redwood Shores, California. The company employs more than 43,000 personnel and has its offices in over 150 countries across the world.

Oracle program is so designed that it can work on every computer operating system. The processes developed through the Oracle program determine the storage, access and management of data.

The program operates in the background, maintains the data and also figures out where it should be stored on the hard drive of your computer. The data is accessed through the SQL which allows you to select, insert, update and delete the data that you want to remove from the computer. Although SQL can be embedded in other languages, you can run the SQL scripts against any database.

Some of the popular Oracle tools to access the database and create programs are SQL Plus, Oracle Developers, HTML DB and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM)

Learning Oracle can be a joyous pastime. You can get Oracle software from its technical website called Oracle Tech Net or OTN. This website provides access to all the Oracle software along with their documentations. There are several forums and discussion boards devoted to the dissemination of knowledge about Oracle. You can join any one or two of them and ask questions and seek clarifications on this subject.

You can try out the Oracle software free of charge before you become a paid license holder.