Bioinformatics and Oracle Extensibility

The Oracle relational database management system, with object-oriented extensions and numerous application-driven enhancements, plays a critical role worldwide in managing the exploding volumes of bioinformatics data. There are many features of the Oracle product which support the bioinformatics community directly already and there are several features which could be exploited more thoroughly by users, service vendors, and Oracle itself to extend that level of support. This paper will present an overview of Oracle features which support storage of bioinformatics data and will discuss extensibility features which give the product room to grow. Some attention will be given to Oracle's own efforts to use that extensibility to exploit emerging standardization of many of the complex data and computation requirements of the life sciences.