The Oracle Database or Oracle refers to an object-relational and database management system abbreviated as ORDBMS, which is produced and also marketed by the renowned Oracle Corporation. The Oracle Database of 11g Release has provided the foundation and ground for information technology to successfully and innovatively deliver all information that is of higher quality service. It also reduces the risk that is deemed to change within IT, and also make further efficient use and application of their budgets. Massive improvements have been realized as the data management foundations and organizations can now utilize this full power of the global leading and most celebrated database to: reduce their storage requirements and procedures by a given factor of 12, realize an increase in the DBA productivity by a given factor of 2, and also eliminate the idle redundancy in their data center.
Microsoft Access 2010, on the other hand, is always out to ensure simplicity. It empowers one to always make the most of his or her information, even if one is not a recognized database expert. Oracle and Access have been known to be relational database engines (Loney, 2008). Access is a product of Microsoft while Oracle sold by Oracle Corporation. However, the two vary in terms of the number of given users that each of them can support. Oracle can support one to many more simultaneous users and it is also a scalable enterprise and database engine.
Contrary to this, Access is as a single-user database. However, there have been great developments in Access since Microsoft released Access 97. This means that it can be augmented and used with the Visual Basic code, allowing it to support a limit of 200 simultaneous users. Another difference comes in as Oracle supports extremely large databases, which goes to an excess of Tens of Terabytes, while, on the other hand, Access can only support smaller databases of 2gigabytes. Another Oracle’s direct competitor is Microsoft's SQL Server. SQL s considered a living language.
This is because it has always continued to grow, develop and also adapt to the ever-changing global demands. Despite the fact that a lot of pressure exists in the market in line with standardizing features and also data exchange between all the databases, most of the vendors still prefer to always lock their clients into one specific package of RDBMS. They do this by getting the latter hooked on only given convenient and nonstandard features which, even sometimes considered improving performance, always making it difficult, expensive, or even impossible to try to port SQL routines and procedures to any different RDBMS (Steven, 2012).Ever after the adoption of SQL89 as the first and main SQL standard, it aimed to standing out as the generic, nonprocedural and also standardized vendor and independent language of all relational databases.
It was successful in its quest. The designers of SQL made it nonprocedural, which is contrary to other programs. SQL was mainly designed for all data manipulation, storage, and also retrieval. This means that its modification was coupled with the database management systems (DBMS).
However, many problems hit the SQL in its many developments in procedural applications. In a bid to overcome these problems that were brought about by SQL procedural deficiency, many database vendors decided to develop their own procedural extensions. These included PL/SQL for the renowned Oracle, the Transact-SQL for the famous Microsoft SQL Server and SQL PL for the IBM DB2 UDB. These latest developments greatly allow for the usage of high-level applications and language like Java or even Visual Basic inside the RDBMS. This SQL that is designed for the future may never emerge to be what people imagine it and also the influence it may have in their lives.
Some of these emerging standards in this sector include the eXtensible Markup Language abbreviated as XML and also On-Line Analytical Processing abbreviated as OLAP (Steven, 2012). Oracle and MS Access database paackages are known to have their own advantages and disadvantages. Mr. Tom Ashton, in selecting Oracle over MS Access, must have weighed the advantages that the former has over MS Access. Oracle stands out as a real Database Management System (DBMS) while MS Access is not. First, one may be carried away by the cost of MS Access as it is extremely cheap and also easy to use.
Access applies the use of wizards in its works and also the GUI tools. This means that it is possible and easy for one to develop a simple, single user and small database by using it. MS Access has never been good for any multi-user application. Experience and research have proven that it is not robust and also does possess excellent multi-user and transactional control. Lastly, Access can never handle massive data amounts. All data in this database is always stored in a given single file which means that it has its own limitations.
Oracle, on the other hand, is a package that is not cheap in any case. It is evidently complex and also difficult for people to administer. There is a lot to smile about the complexity that Oracle presents since it comes out as robust. It presents a ground for tackling each and everything that one may wish to do, unlike Access (Iggy, 2009). It is also particularly designed to handle multi-user applications and issues.
This means that many users can always access similar data that exists in that instance without having any problems. This is also facilitated by Oracle's extremely perfect transactional control. Oracle still handles huge data amounts. A good example is Oracle 8i which can and always handles up to more than 512 petabytes of data (Iggy, 2009).
Despite the fact that Oracle stands out over Access, the latter still has a ground to cling on. It is very essential when it comes to designing any quick database and one that is simple since it will be less costly and also less time employed. On the other hand, robust and scalable applications call for the use of Oracle. Mr. Tom Ashton made the right choice.
