Summary

In this chapter, you learned that

• A table is created using the CREATE TABLE statement.

• A sequence is a database item that generates a sequence of integers. You typically use the integers generated by a sequence to populate a numeric primary key column.

• An index for a database table is similar in concept to a book index, except that database indexes are used to find specific rows in a table.

• Generally, you should only create an index on a column when you find that you are retrieving a small number of rows from a table containing many rows.

• A view is basically a predefined query on one or more base tables. Among other benefits, views allow you to hide complexity from a user , and implement another layer of security by only allowing a view to access a limited set of data in the base tables.

In the next chapter, you ll learn about PL/SQL programming.