Another major product line currently being marketed is a series of applications
developed for certain industries. This is designed to satisfy those organizations that
wish to purchase turnkey solutions from a single vendor. These applications provide
most of the common functions needed in such industries as financials (accounting,
inventory, and so forth) and manufacturing (production scheduling and tracking).
They, of course, are based around tables within an Oracle database, but they also
consist of a fairly complex array of programs that would take an organization some
time to develop on its own.
An important set of products in modern, multi-vendor, and client-server environments
includes the networking products provided by Oracle and other vendors.
These products allow developers to write applications on one platform (for example,
a PC) that access data located in an Oracle database on another type of computer
(for example, a UNIX server). It also allows different Oracle databases to exchange
information, both on an as-requested basis and through automatic synchronization
of specified data tables (the distributed database option). Finally, there are Oracle
and third-party gateways that allow Oracle databases to communicate with other
vendor’s databases, such as those from Sybase or IBM’s DB2.
The final component in the world of Oracle comprises the interfaces provided to
products that are not produced by Oracle Corporation. In many installations, this
is a major part of the environment that the DBA has to understand and support.
Companies such as Powersoft have made significant inroads with sophisticated yet
simple application development tools that have become standards in many organizations.
Therefore, it is important for a DBA to understand how these tools interface
to the database.
This is the world of Oracle as it exists today. It is interesting to note the directions
in which Oracle seems to be heading. We can only guess these directions based on
company statements and some applied logic, but here is my best guess. Oracle has
placed a strong emphasis on getting into the multimedia environment. It seems to
envision an Oracle data storage utility as the basis for distributing multimedia
services, such as on-demand television programs. Another direction seems to be
acquiring and/or developing tools to compete in the object-oriented development tool
environment with Powerbuilder. A final observation is that Oracle, and most other
RDBMS vendors, seem to be moving towards the capability of storing objects (blobs
of any type of data such as X-ray images, songs, or videos) within their database.
Although many smaller vendors have designed pure object-oriented databases,
Oracle and other major RDBMS vendors seem to be migrating to object orientation
gradually.
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