Logical vs. Physical Storage Structures
Data independence is a primary characteristic of a relational database system such as Oracle. An Oracle database's physical structure is independent of and hidden from an end user's logical view of the data. The benefit of data independence is that typical end users and application developers can easily access data in logical structures such as tables by using simple SQL commands, without having to consider the complexities of the data's physical storage. For example, when you execute a query that targets a table, you don't have to consider where the table's data is stored on disk, because Oracle transparently maps columns and rows of the table's data to files and physical bytes on disk. And after a database ...
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