Oracle Developer Essentials: Data Types

Character Data Types
Hello. My name is David Berry. Welcome to this module on Character Data Types in Oracle. In this module we're going to cover how you store character data in your Oracle database. We'll start off with a basic overview of the character data types that are available. We'll then talk more specifically about the differences between fixed length data types like CHAR and variable length data types like VARCHAR2. Then we'll move into a discussion about character sets, which will help us understand the differences between data types like VARCHAR2 and NVARCHAR2 and when we would want to use an NVARCHAR2 data type for one of our columns. Finally, we'll wrap up with a discussion of the Oracle RAW data type, which doesn't actually store character data, but an array of bytes. We'll talk about RAW in this module because many times people will store an array of bytes in a character column after encoding the data into base64 or hex, but the RAW data type provides an alternative to this.

Numeric Data Types
Hello. My name is David Berry. Welcome to this module on Numeric Data Types in Oracle. Along with character base data, numeric data forms the bulk of the data that you will probably need to store in your Oracle database. In this module we'll cover the data types that Oracle provides to store this numeric data. We'll start out by talking about the Oracle NUMBER data type, which is the primary numeric data type in Oracle and the one that you will use most often. We'll also cover how to define a numeric column as an identify column, a column that will automatically generate a sequential value when you insert rows into the table. And then we will cover the BINARY_FLOAT and the BINARY_DOUBLE data types, which are considered hardware or native data types because they follow the IEEE specification on floating point data types and can therefore make use of hardware to perform their calculations.

Large Object Data Types
Hello. My name is David Berry. Welcome to this module on Large Object Data Types in Oracle. The data types that we have covered so far in this course are useful for storing small pieces of data in your database. There are times, however, when you may need to store much larger pieces of data like a very long string or even items like images or documents. This is where large object data types come in. In this module we'll start out by covering what large object data types are available in Oracle and briefly cover when you would choose each one. We'll then talk about how large object data types work in the database and how their data is stored. This will give us a solid foundation to understand how to create columns in our tables that use large object data types and what options Oracle makes available to us in creating those columns.