In what file extension the oracle tables are stored?

Question

Can we access the oracle tables using that file extension?
Can we access oracle from any software apart from SQL editor without needing odbc or any other connectivity?

Answer 1

Hi,

You can't really edit the files without going through a SQL editor (SQL plus, TOAD, etc). The reason has to do with how Oracle stores data. Tables are not stored in individual files, but rather extents or blocks of data.

Without going too much into Oracle's underlying architecture, when you create a DB you select the extent size and blocksize. This is how oracle stores data. When you create a new table, its template is saved, and the cotents of each row are merely a pointer to the extent in which the data is located.

I believe this answers your first two questions. Your thrid question is that you can access Oracle programatically with anything, but you MUST have a connection at some point to logically pull the data from the DB.

Although, I am not sure why you are looking to do this, but you may consider writing a sceduled stored proc that will dump the contents of a particular table to a csv type file, and then you can look at the data from anything.

Hope this helps,

Leo

Answer 2

Oracle Database File Extension

Answer 3

Oracle tables are stored in tablespaces (which are logical).
Tablespaces have 1 or more datafiles (physical, i.e. may be viewed on the filesystem). Therefore the table data is stored in tablespace datafiles on your server.

However you can't go directly into one of these (binary!) files and view or edit the contents of tables or any information about the tables. You must do this through some sort of program (such as SQL*Plus, TOAD, Excel, Access). This program normally has to be told how to connect to the database, i.e. via SQL*Net, odbc, jdbc, etc.

Oracle is a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), therefore the data in the tables is not stored is a flat file (ascii) that you can easily view/modify.

Glad to see your interest, but it's clear you are a little new to the software, so check out Oracle Technology Network, otn.oracle.com - it's a great learning site, where you may download documentation for the version of the database you are working with.

I would recommend that you begin with the Concepts Manual to find out more about logical and physical structures and database processes, as well as the SQL Reference and SQL*Plus users Guide.

HTH

Answer 4

Without getting into too many details, all the information/data we enter into oracle gets stored in DATAFILES with the extension .dbf (usually). You cannot read the data from them because it's only read by Oracle. I don't believe there is any other way of reading the data without accessing the database via SQL PLUS or any other such tool.

However, you can export the data out of the database into .csv files which you can then open via Excel and go through the data.