Good Morning,

In the last year, I've started to support Mongo databases. Mongo stores data in BSON which is the binary form of JSON. JSON is just the field name followed by a value. This doesn't seem so different from Oracle since Oracle also its data in a series of columns with values.

I'm curious to know how an Oracle row looks like. If a table has the following columns:

-Fname string
-Lname string
-notes string

If row has say, Fname='John' and Lname='Doe', does Oracle add the field names Fname and Lname to each row? Does the row look like this on disk:

Fname='John', Lname='Doe', notes null
or does it look like this:
'John','Doe', null

My guess is that it looks like option 1.

It would be nice if you could also provide what an Oracle row looks like on disk.

Thank you

John

create table find_this ( 
  col_name1 varchar2(10), col_name2 int, col_name3 varchar2(10), 
  col_name4 int, col_name5 int
);
insert into find_this values ( 'Find me 1', null, 'and this 1', null, null );
insert into find_this values ( 'Find me 2', null, 'and this 2', null, null );
insert into find_this values ( 'Find me 3', null, 'and this 3', null, null );
commit;
alter system checkpoint;

,^A^C       Find me 3<FF>
and this 3,^A^C Find me 2<FF>
and this 2,^A^C Find me 1<FF>
and this 1^A^F