an answer I require

[calimac]

When I was a child, I would ask my mother questions about things I did not understand. Now, sometimes she asks me questions. Today, for instance, over lunch, she pointed to a newspaper article on Oracle's acquisition of Sun and said, "There's a question I've long wondered and have never gotten an answer to. What exactly is it that Oracle produces?"

Wow. That was a stumper. I chewed my sandwich and thought for a while. Then I realized there is one thing Oracle is known for producing. "A flamboyant CEO."

"Seriously," I added, "I think it's something to do with databases. I don't know exactly what it is that Sun produces either, except that whatever it is, they also produce a lot of technical documentation in support of it, since I know people whose job it is to write that."

Yeah, I know I could go look all this stuff up, though it wasn't so easy to do so over lunch, and there is nothing in this world so optimistic as a Wikipedia author's assumption of a lay readership's grasp of a technical subject.

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Oracle's flagship product, which is the basis of a great deal of its current product line, is the Oracle relational database management system (RDBMS), or "database" for short. Essentially, it's software that allows users to store, manage, search, and report on enormous amounts of structured data.

"Structured data" is key, here. You would not store millions of long documents in a database, because documents are unstructured. You'd store accounting recordings, product information, and so on, the kind of data that lends itself to being stored in tables.

You can think of a table as a kind of spreadsheet, where each row represents one item in the table and each column represents a particular piece of information about every item. So, if you had a customer table, each row would be a single customer. The columns might include customer name, address, city, state, zip code, phone number, contact name, etc.

An accounting application might have customer information, catalog information (about whatever product the company sells), and order information, all in different tables. There are various ways to connect the tables to each other so that you can unify the information in them, for reporting or lookup purposes.

The Oracle database has a capacity that might as well be unlimited. The only limits I know of are set by the hardware it's running on. I have installed Oracle and run Oracle on a low-end PC, for example. (Not at my current job, but at my previous job, where the primary software product ran on top of a database. You probably don't want to know more than that.)

And...that explains the Sun purchase. Sun makes server computers that run Sun's Solaris operating system. Solaris is a common UNIX flavor, along with IBM's AIX, HP's HP-UX, and free variants such as Linux. Oracle installations are more likely to run on Sun machines than machines by any other maker. The purchase of Sun gets Oracle into a position where they can offer a more-fully-integrated product line, offering both software and a platform to run it on.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Plus Sun has some software products that integrate well into the Oracle line.

I find this purchase ironic: I started out in technical editing in the US working for a company called Ashton-Tate that made the first PC relational database (dBASE). And now (if I'm lucky and keep my job) I'll be working for another database company!

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Ahaha. My most extensive programming experience was in dBASE and Clipper. I think I finally tossed my dBASE IV disks in around 2001.

My current job is technical writing, but I've never worked for a database company. I hope you keep your job (and I wish I had an editor).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know what databases are. I've even used database programs before I started keeping my databases in Excel. It's just that neither of us were sure what Oracle did, and the articles on it were not forthcoming.

It's a little like not being able to name any compositions by Thomas Arne doesn't mean you've never heard of "Rule Britannia."

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Okay - misled by your comment about the technical info in Wikipedia.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

General comment based on past experience. Didn't try looking up "relational database".

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

Sun long claimed that they produced '.'

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