Database

Academic Alliance Program: The Academic Alliance Program is Oracle's program to make Oracle software available to higher education institutions for a nominal license fee ($500/yr). The program encourages use of Oracle tools in database courses, and comes with support, upgrades, and a 1-year license fee that can be renewed. This is a huge bargain for college campuses and a great many are taking advantage of it.

Data Warehousing: A data warehouse is a collection of data gathered and organized so that it can easily by analyzed, extracted, synthesized, and otherwise be used for the purposes of further understanding the data. It may be contrasted with data that is gathered to meet immediate business objectives such as order and payment transactions, although this data would also usually become part of a data warehouse.

Developer 2000/Designer 2000: Two Oracle tools used by businesses to build sophisticated database systems, they are given to university campuses as part of the Oracle Academic Alliance Program.

Personal Oracle: A version of the Oracle database software scaled-down small enough to reside on a PC, but still containing enough power to handle large-scale database tasks better than Access or Paradox.

SQL (Structured Query Language): SQL is a standard interactive and programming language for getting information from and updating a database. Queries take the form of a command language that lets you select, insert, update, find out the location of data, and so forth. SQL was first introduced as a commercial database system in 1979 by Oracle Corporation.