This Oracle/SQL tutorial provides a detailed introduction to the SQL query language and the Oracle Relational Database Management System. Further information about Oracle and SQL can be found on the web site www.db.cs.ucdavis.edu/dbs. Comments, corrections, or additions to these notes are welcome. Many thanks to Christina Chung for comments on the previous version.

A table is uniquely identified by its name and consists of rows that contain the stored information, each row containing exactly one tuple (or record). A table can have one or more columns. A column is made up of a column name and a data type, and it describes an attribute of the tuples. The structure of a table, also called relation schema, thus is defined by its attributes. The type of information to be stored in a table is defined by the data types of the attributes at table creation time.

SQL uses the terms table, row, and column for relation, tuple, and attribute, respectively. In this tutorial we will use the terms interchangeably.

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