Oracle data cartridges

Data storage and querying are the most fundamental requirements of all informatics systems. Thanks to the Oracle Extensibility Framework (a.k.a. Oracle Data Cartridge Technology), chemical structure data can be stored and queried using direct SQL and special query operators, such as substructure search, flexmatch search, similarity search, and formula search. Also, some indexing techniques make these otherwise slow searches fast. Detailed discussions about these databases and cartridges are beyond the scope of this book. Please refer to the vendor s website and product documentation for more information. 

In the case of the chemistry database, the situation is more complex. Compound data cannot be queried or updated using standard SQL. The read and write operations are encapsulated in vendor-specific Oracle data cartridges. Therefore, the Data Persistence Layer has another responsibility— hide vendor specifics with a standard interface so that the Business Layer does not care about vendor variations. 

Accord for Oracle—a chemical data cartridge (see Glossary)... 

Much of this book discusses ways in which the RDBMS can be used and even extended to handle chemical structures correctly, quickly, and conveniently. Extensions of the capabilities of PostgreSQL are simply called extensions. Oracle uses the term data cartridge. There are chemical extensions or cartridges available for PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MySQL. 

---