Extensibility Features and Options

Oracle’s extensibility features and options extend SQL to perform tasks that can’t otherwise be easily programmed in a relational database. These include manipulation of time-series data, multimedia, and spatial data. These features are typically used by application developers but are sometimes bundled with applications sold by Oracle partners.

Oracle Time Series

A time series is a set of data in which each entry contains a timestamp. Such data is typically used in financial and trading applications and is often obtained from data-collection devices. In general, tables with time-series data don’t contain a lot of columns but do contain many rows of data (perhaps representing a long history). A common example of a time series is the daily reporting of a stock’s highs and lows, opens and closes, and volumes, as shown in Table 13-1.

Table 13-1. Typical Historical Time Series of Stock Trading Data

Symbol

Timestamp

Open

Close

High

Low

Volume

BIGCO

03-01-1999

30.125

29.75

30.50

29.50

285,000

BIGCO

03-02-1999

30.00

29.50

30.00

28.50

290,000

BIGCO

03-03-1999

29.25

30.125

30.50

29.00

275,000

BIGCO

03-04-1999

30.00

30.50

31.125

30.00

285,000

BIGCO

03-05-1999

30.25

31.125

32.00

30.00

310,000

BIGCO

03-08-1999

31.00

30.25

31.50

29.75

295,000

BIGCO

03-09-1999

30.50

31.00

30.50

32.125

300,000

Time-series functions for analyzing this data were first introduced as a separate option in Oracle8. Today, time-series ...

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