Oracle is one of the largest vendors in the enterprise IT market and the shorthand name of its flagship product, a relational database management system (RDBMS) that's formally called Oracle Database. The database software sits at the center of many corporate IT environments, supporting a mix of transaction processing, business intelligence and analytics applications. Oracle Database's architecture Like other RDBMS software, Oracle Database is built on top of SQL, a standardized programming language that database administrators, data analysts and other IT professionals use to manage databases and query the data stored in them. The Oracle software is tied to PL/SQL, an implementation developed by Oracle that adds a set of proprietary programming extensions to standard SQL -- a common practice among RDBMS vendors. Oracle Database also supports programming in Java, and programs written in PL/SQL or Java can be called from the other language.