Oracle Data Types

Built-in Oracle Data Types For Creating Database

Oracle Data Types

A database is an organized collection of data that makes it easier to save, add, access, and update information. Examples of databases are employee information and inventory of materials. This is widely used in business, schools and other industries. There are different programs used in making database. One of these is Oracle. The Oracle data types used can be numbers, alphabets or alphanumeric.

An oracle database is composed of rows and columns. Each column has a title and below these are the variables. For example columns may have the title “employee number”, “name”, “address” and “telephone number”. Below the employee number column are the employee numbers and next to each number are the employee’s name, address and telephone number that are under their specified columns. The variables under each column have corresponding Oracle data types. The built-in Oracle data types or the data types that come with the program are character types, number types, long or raw types, date/time and interval types, large object types and rowid data types. Character types are used for storing alphanumeric data such as char, nchar, varchar and varchar2. Number types are used for storing numeric data such as number, binary_float and binary_double. Long or raw data types are used for storing long data which maximum is 2G in length and can only be used in one column per table. Date and time intervals data types are used for storing date and time such as date, timestamp, date with time zone, timestamp with local time zone, interval year to month and interval day to second. Aside from these built-in data types, the Oracle user can also make user defined data types to be used in creating database.

You may find more information on how to make user defined Oracle data types on the Internet or by reading Oracle software books.