Oracle Essentials [Electronic resources] : Oracle Database 10g, 3rd Edition نسخه متنی

1.3 Summary of Oracle Features

The Oracle
database is a broad and powerful product. The remainder of this book
examines different aspects of Oracle such as data structures,
performance, and parallel processing. But before you can understand
each of the different areas of Oracle in depth, you must familiarize
yourself with the range of features in the Oracle database.

The rest of this chapter gives you a high-level overview of the basic
areas of functionality in the Oracle product family. By the end of
this chapter, you will at least have some orientation points to guide
you in exploring the topics in the rest of this book.

To give some structure to the broad spectrum of the Oracle database,
we've organized the features into the following
sections:

Database application development features

Database connection features

Distributed database features

Data movement features

Performance features

Database management features

At the end of each of the following sections describing database
features we've included a subsection called
"Availability," which indicates the
availability of each feature in specific Oracle products. You should
be aware that as this feature list grows and Oracle implements
packaging changes in new versions, the availability of these features
in the version you implement may vary slightly.

In this chapter, we've included a lot of terminology and rather abbreviated descriptions of features. Oracle is a huge system. Our goal here is to quickly familiarize you with the full range of features in the system. Subsequent chapters will provide additional details. Obviously, though, whole books can be (and have been!) written about each of the feature areas summarized here.