Internals: selection of column data within a row

Hi,

Questions here on internals..

1- How exactly is Oracle or any RDBMS able to select data at the column level
2- Do RDBMS's store data in an array and does it use pointers or offsets to identify a specific column (when doing column level lookups) ?

Maybe a brief overview of how the oracle engine works would be good if anyone knows it that would help explain how can do this.

Thank you,

Jack Received on Sun Feb 12 2006 - 23:02:01 CST