what is oracle

Oracle is a powerful client/server tool for managing Databases. We explain the tool and the help it offers to the developer.

Oracle is basically a client/server tool for managing Databases. It is a product sold worldwide, although the great power it has and its high price mean that it is only seen in very large and multinational companies, as a general rule. The same thing happens in the development of web pages: as it is a very expensive system, it is not as widespread as other databases, for example, Access, MySQL, SQL Server, etc.

We are now going to focus on what exactly Oracle is and how programming on it works. Oracle, as I mentioned before, is based on client/server technology, well, for its use it would first be necessary to install the server tool (Oracle 8i) and later we could attack the database from other computers with development tools such as Oracle Designer and Oracle Developer, which are the basic Oracle programming tools.

To develop in Oracle we use PL/SQL, a 5th generation language, quite powerful to treat and manage the database, also as a general rule SQL is usually used when creating a form.

It is logically possible to attack the database through the SQL plus incorporated in the Oracle program package in order to perform queries, using the SQL language.

The Developer is a tool that allows us to create forms locally, that is, through this tool we can create forms, compile them and execute them, but if we want others to work on this form we must copy it regularly to a shared folder for everyone, so that, when they want to make a change, they must copy it from said folder and then upload it back to the folder. As we can see, this system is quite cumbersome and unreliable since it is quite normal for versions to be lost and crushed frequently. The main advantage of this tool is that it is quite intuitive and it has a way that allows us to compose the form, just as we would do it in Visual Basic or Visual C, this is highly appreciated.

The previous problems are completely solved with Designer, which is a tool that connects to the database and therefore we create the forms in it, in this way everyone connects through Designer to the application that contains all the forms and there is no problems of different versions, this is very useful and perfect to avoid crushing the work of others. But the main and most notable problem is the lack of a visual environment to design the form, that is, a tree-like structure appears in which we insert a form, while inside it we insert blocks or modules that are the structures that will contain the elements of the forms, which can be based on tables or not.

Therefore, if we want to make forms to practice or to test what this Oracle thing is, I recommend that you use Developer because it is much easier and more intuitive at first.