In our last chapter, we introduced the concept of a schema. We said that, in Oracle, no overt distinction is made between database users and object owners. When a database user creates database objects, that user owns those objects and they form the user's schema.
Throughout this book, we have only worked with objects that are within the Companylink schema. Thus, when we accessed these tables, we referred to them only by their name. Technically, however, we could reference them by their schema name as well as using dot-notation, as shown in the following example:
Prefixing the award table with companylink allows us refer to the table by its actual schema name. If we logged into the database with a username other than companylink, we would be required to do this. Thus, if we were connected to the database as the user manager and queried from the award table without the schema prefix, we would receive an error saying that the table doesn't exist. This...