Oracle has many advantages and features that makes it popular and thereby makes it as the world’s largest enterprise software company. Oracle comes with new versions with new features implemented in new version while the features of earlier versions still being maintained. One important aspect is Oracle databases tend to be backwards compatible. Also when Oracle releases a new version, their documentation contains a list of all the features new to that version thus makes it user friendly for one to learn the new features. 

Oracle takes a lead role because of some of the following reasons:

Oracle is used for almost all large application and one of the main applications in which oracle takes its major presence is banking. In fact ten of the world’s top 10 banks run Oracle applications this is because oracle offers a powerful combination of technology and comprehensive, pre-integrated business applications, including key functionality built specifically for banks.

Some similar databases like Sybase, SQL-Server one have facilities for using loops, conditions, arrays and so on in a program and also facilities like cursors and temp tables but all this would be used in a convoluted fashion which are very slow and resource consuming operations. The operations are not implemented as in Oracle which is efficient enough.

Also with the features available in oracle with the earlier versions in market the oracle company keeps upgrading and releasing new products into market, new versions releases which serves better than the earlier versions and thus the performance is improved much in later versions and thereby retaining the market growth and thus proves greater satisfaction to the customers using this technology. Thus the advantage of a higher version is that one would have more features and better capabilities.

For instance oracle 8i version has many new features which helped users namely like with oracle 8i one could run Java in the database, had features like new features on partitioning to support large database and so on. With the next version 9i oracle had these facilities maintained and had more new facilities added to it namely like new features added to help the DBA to handle change database configuration and so on.

Oracle is a database that responds very well with excellent performance in demanding environments. Oracle is a major database which along with its added features passes the ACID test, which is important in insuring the integrity of data. This is very important because data is the heart of any system in organization. A reliable and adequate database system has the following properties:

Atomicity:
That is Results of a transaction’s execution are either all committed or all rolled back. 

Consistency:
The database is transformed from one valid state to another valid state. Illegal transactions aren’t allowed and, if an integrity constraint can’t be satisfied then the transaction is rolled back. 

Isolation:
The results of a transaction are invisible to other transactions until the transaction is complete thus increasing the security on data. 

Durability:
Once committed (completed), the results of a transaction are permanent and survive future system and media failures and thus ensuring maintenance and protection of data.

All the above are well maintained by Oracle database.

The latest version oracle 10g has many features and one new feature is the introduction of recycle bin. This option when enabled could be used by users just like Windows recycle bin or Mac Trash. Dropped tables go "into" the recycle bin, and can be restored from the recycle bin.

One of the main advantage of oracle over other databases is in its recent version oracle has the concept of Flashback technology. That is we all know that data is the heart of any application or organization and thus this requires careful maintenance. But sometimes application outage can occur and mostly DBA claim the reasons for this as hardware failure and apart from this the reason would be human errors like accidental deletion of valuable data, deleting the wrong data, or dropping the wrong table. So it is very essential to take care of such situation and this is done in oracle’s latest technology called flash introduced in its latest version. By Flash technology it helps in recovery by working just on the changed data. Thus Flashback provides an

• Efficient recovery from human errors 
• Faster database recovery 
• Helps in simplifying the management and administration processes

and so on.  

Thus oracle has many advantages and features that give security, protection, maintenance, reliability and performance on operation of data and with this in addition its main popularity and stability is because it keeps on adding new features which makes it user friendly for users and popularly used database among organizations.