Oracle Essentials: Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8, Second Edition

Extensibility Features and Options

Oracle’s extensibility features and options extend SQL to perform tasks that can’t otherwise be easily programmed in a relational database. These include manipulation of time-series data, multimedia, and spatial data. These features are typically used by application developers but are sometimes bundled with applications sold by Oracle partners.

Oracle Time Series

A time series is a set of data in which each entry contains a timestamp. Such data is typically used in financial and trading applications and is often obtained from data-collection devices. In general, tables with time-series data don’t contain a lot of columns but do contain many rows of data (perhaps representing a long history). A common example of a time series is the daily reporting of a stock’s highs and lows, opens and closes, and volumes, as shown in Table 13-1.

Table 13-1. Typical Historical Time Series of Stock Trading Data

Symbol	Timestamp	Open	Close	High	Low	Volume
BIGCO	03-01-1999	30.125	29.75	30.50	29.50	285,000
BIGCO	03-02-1999	30.00	29.50	30.00	28.50	290,000
BIGCO	03-03-1999	29.25	30.125	30.50	29.00	275,000
BIGCO	03-04-1999	30.00	30.50	31.125	30.00	285,000
BIGCO	03-05-1999	30.25	31.125	32.00	30.00	310,000
BIGCO	03-08-1999	31.00	30.25	31.50	29.75	295,000
BIGCO	03-09-1999	30.50	31.00	30.50	32.125	300,000

Time-series functions for analyzing this data were first introduced as a separate option in Oracle8. Today, time-series ...