Oracle’s family of industry-leading database, networking and gateway products enable corporations to access any data, on any server, over any network, from any client device.
The Oracle Database has been designed for the emerging hosted application market on the internet. With transparent, rapid-growth clustering capabilities, powerful and cost effective security measures, zero-data-loss safeguards and real-time intelligence, Oracle DB is a complete and simple software infrastructure for the internet’s next generation.
The Oracle9i Database Server was designed to consolidate data or Internet Content from many specialized data sources. Through a comprehensive data extensibility architecture, the Oracle Database provides facilities to efficiently store, manage, index, search and access large volumes of:
Structured Data modelled either as Relational structures or Object-relational structures (object types and collections) including those with inheritance.
Data in Large Objects (LOBs) which can be either BLOBs, CLOBs, NCLOBs, or BFILEs. Multimedia Data consisting of Text, Image, Audio, Video, or Spatial data.
Files through the Internet File System which allows any file to be stored and managed in the Oracle Database; and XML Data through support of the new XMLType which allows both structured and unstructured XML Data and Documents to be stored, managed, and accessed efficiently.
Specialized Data consisting of e-mail, Unified Messaging, Enterprise Messaging, and LDAP Directory Data.
In addition, these different kinds of data are simply treated as different datatypes within the Oracle Database and, as a result, it is very easy to combine these different types of data within a single SQL query expression or an application.
Besides, the Oracle9i is an object-relational database and it provides the most complete solution for addressing the object functionality needs of the mainstream business market.
It enables the management of complex Java or multimedia data in developing applications for the Internet.
It provides support for the graph- or tree-structured C++ and Java data encountered in vertical industry applications, such as in telecommunications, energy, and finance.
It facilitates flexible, maintainable code for traditional database applications.
It enables the database to be customized for specific application domains.
Combining these capabilities in a single data store, which is also the industry’s highest performing, most robust and scalable deployment platform, the Oracle9i object-relational technology defines the next generation of databases.
Databases have four fundamental requirements:
Modelling Business Processes Better
Businesses constantly search for ways to manage the complexity of modelling their complicated and constantly changing processes. The model must be flexible and capable of supporting complexity. Applications need to be able to treat these business abstractions in the same way across all tiers of a IT infrastructure, as complete entities, whether they reside in the database or manipulated outside of it.
This requires the database to:
Allow the native representation of complex business objects in the database.
Provide ways to query over these objects.
Provide mechanisms for the database to seamlessly map the stored business objects to client-side applications or mid-tier servers.
Allow access to business objects from multiple languages and interfaces.
Integrating All Data in a Single Store
Early information systems dealt with simple, structured data. Gradually, the ability to model the real world better has led to a progressive growth of data-complexity in such systems. It has become clear that the prevailing technologies are no longer universally adequate to handle the complex, content-rich data that applications demand. In industry, the answer has been to use the basic constructs of object technology to rapidly standardize on complex data models.
The Internet has brought a new infrastructure over which rich, multimedia information can be easily exchanged. Users demand a richer semantic from applications. People want to deal with images and HTML, not characters and lines. As businesses rise to exploit the Web, they are looking for new ways to combine rich, unstructured multimedia information with their business information. Finally, a number of new initiatives, such as a standard Extensible Markup Language (XML), are being pursued in the World Wide Web Consortium. These bring yet another kind of data into play – semi structured data whose format is not known a priori, but deduced from the data itself. To facilitate all these applications, the database must provide a single store where customers can store and query on all the various kinds of data they use to compose their business objects. These objects include structured data (simple or complex), unstructured rich multimedia data, as well as the semi-structured data arising from XML, or other interchange formats.
Leveraging The Web
In order that databases continue to seamlessly serve thousands of intranet/internet users, it is imperative that there be native support in the database for Web technologies. The database must provide support for Java, and Java objects must be seamlessly represented in the database. There must be support for storing retrieving data in popular Web formats such as HTML and XML.
Exploiting Extensible, Component-Based Architectures
Corporate intranets and the public Internet are rapidly becoming the deployment environments for many mission-critical applications. Spurred by the escalating cost of building systems from scratch, and the simultaneous proliferation of public component-based standards, such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), corporations now find it feasible to build applications by assembling prefabricated components. Component technology rests on the notion of reusable objects, and it is imperative that all the tiers of an enterprise architecture leverage the advantages of object technology. The database infrastructure must allow the plugging-in of modular components, to easily extend itself to new requirements and new data.
Using New Technology to Evolve Existing Applications
To protect and leverage customers’ existing investments in technology, their existing relational databases must be enriched with object technology. In evolving their relational databases, customers must be provided with a smooth evolutionary path that meets three requirements:
It must allow users to leverage their knowledge of existing products.
It must provide predictable performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability.
It must conform to open industry standards.
Oracle9i’s ‘objects and extensibility’ technology meets all these new requirements on databases. Let us look more closely at Oracle’s approach.

Defining Oracle’s Approach

The object-relational technology in 9i has five basic design guidelines. It has to be:

• Evolutionary
• Integrated
• Pragmatic
• Open
• Comprehensive