The catalog of ORACLE is a very large tabular variable that can be accessed through several views defined on this table.
In ORACLE a list of the table owned by the current user is contained by the view user catalog, also accessible through its synonym cat. A content of this view is shown in Figure 5.24.
Information that describes space allocation and statistical properties can be found in the view named USER TABLES, also named TABS. A description of the attributes of tabular variables and of their domains can be found in the view USER TAB COLUMNS also accessible as COLS. For example, the query:
select table_name,column_name,data_type from COLS;