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.
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Date: 2009-04-22 12:54 am (UTC)"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.