The Oracle database is a broad and powerful product. The remainder of this book examines different aspects of Oracle—for example, 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.
Tip
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 features summarized here.
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