About Tables - Oracle 10g

Tables are the basic unit of data storage in an Oracle Database. Data is stored in rows and columns. You define a table with a table name, such as employees, and a set of columns. You give each column a column name, such as employee_id, last_name, and job_id; a datatype, such as VARCHAR2, DATE, or NUMBER; and a width. The width can be predetermined by the datatype, as in DATE. If columns are of the NUMBER datatype, define precision and scale instead of width. A row is a collection of column information corresponding to a single record.

You can specify rules for each column of a table. These rules are called integrity constraints. One example is a NOT NULL integrity constraint. This constraint forces the column to contain a value in every row. After you create a table, insert rows of data using SQL statements. Table data can then be queried, deleted, or updated using SQL.