The Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle RDBMS or simply as Oracle) is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation.
Larry Ellison and his friends, former co-workers Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started the consultancy Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977. SDL developed the original version of the Oracle software. The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a CIA-funded project Ellison had worked on while previously employed by Ampex.
Physical and logical structures
The Oracle DBMS can store and execute stored procedures and functions within itself. PL/SQL (Oracle Corporation's proprietary procedural extension to SQL), or the object-oriented language Java can invoke such code objects and/or provide the programming structures for writing them.
Storage
The Oracle RDBMS stores data logically in the form of tablespaces and physically in the form of data files .Index Segments, etc. Segments in turn comprise one or more extents. Extents comprise groups of contiguous data blocks. Data blocks form the basic units of data storage.
Disk files
Disk files primarily consist of the following types:
Data and index files: Those files are necessary for the physical storage, which can consist of the data dictionary data), user data, or index data. These files can be managed manually or managed by Oracle itself ("Oracle-managed files"). Note that a datafile has to belong to exactly one tablespace, whereas a tablespace can consist of multiple datafiles.