Wednesday, October 17, 2007

OracleFaqz - Oracle's tools to access the Database and Create Programs

SQL*Plus has a command line interface. With it, you can access the database and write stored procedures, you can run SQL commands to retrieve data and you can run scripts of either SQL, PL/SQL or built-in SQL*Plus commands, or a mixture of those three things.

Oracle Developer is a 4GL GUI application Builder. With Developer, you can create forms, reports, and graphics. Oracle*Forms and Oracle*Reports are two components of Oracle Developer. Earlier versions created client-server applications, but the more recent versions create web applications that run under the Oracle Application Server (OAS). OAS is a web-based application server sold by Oracle. OAS is licensed separately and is very expensive (as are its closed source competitors). The current version is OAS 10g.

HTML DB is a fairly new application builder geared toward web development (added to the DB with release 9iR2). HTML DB does not need an application server. This tool runs from the database and can be presented to the web using the Apache web server that comes with the database. Since this is not an additional license, it provides a cheaper way to develop applications. Developer is a feature-rich thick client with all of the normal GUI widgets. HTML DB is HTML-based and is very thin and limited to the HTML provided widgets.

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) is the Enterprise GUI tool to manage the database. From this tool, you can perform any action in the database that is required. This tool is primarily used for administration but can also be provided to developers for application tuning and monitoring. In Oracle 10g, OEM also provides Grid control.

There are also a lot of third party tools for accessing the database. For our purposes, our primary tool for data access will be SQL*Plus. In the future, I will cover creating applications with HTML DB and accessing your data with some choice third-party tools.

How about Java? Java is the current hot language, especially on the web. I will also be covering Java in the database in future articles. Java is natively supported by Oracle. Technically, you could use Java to create your stored procedures if you chose, but I am not a proponent of that. When you are working inside the database, I believe that you should only resort to Java when you cannot accomplish a task in PL/SQL. As you'll see, there is very little you cannot accomplish with PL/SQL.

It will be hard to learn Oracle if you can't play with it. So where can you get access to this software? Oracle has a technical web site called OTN (Oracle Tech Net) that provides access to all of Oracle's software and all of the documentation for that software. There are also forums and many other tools to use to help you learn Oracle. You have to register to access it, but registration is free. Go to http://otn.oracle.com/ and get an ID today. In future articles, I will be spending a lot of time accessing this web site to download software and documentation. My next article will cover downloading Oracle 10g and installing it.

As a side note, Oracle provides all of their software with a developer's license. This license allows you to try out the software free of charge. You may not create production applications without a paid license, but development with the tools is acceptable. I am not a lawyer, so I recommend that you review the license when you download any software from OTN.

Also, a note about versioning in Oracle; all products released by Oracle have a version. The current version of the database is 10g Release 1, also written as 10gR1. In addition to this semantic release name, each release has a numeric version. The numeric release for 10gR1 is 10.0.1.3.

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