The Oracle relational database management system, with object-oriented extensions and numerous applicationdriven enhancements, plays a critical role worldwide in managing the exploding volumes of bioinformatics data. There are many features of the Oracle product which support the bioinformatics community directly already and there are several features that could be exploited more thoroughly by users, service vendors, and Oracle itself to extend that level of support. This paper will present an overview of Oracle features that support storage of bioinformatics data and will discuss extensibility features that give the product room to grow. Some attention will be given to Oracle's own efforts to use that extensibility to make commodities of many of the complex data and computation requirements of the life sciences.