Concept of Cardinalilty in Oracle
The concept of cardinality does not change whether it is used in reference to the Oracle database or some other SQL database. Cardinality is the size of a set of some elements. From the mathematics point of view a set contains only distinct elements. When you reference values of a certain column as a set its cardinality is the number of unique values. When you reference rows returned by an operation they all comprise the result set (each has a unique row ID, to put it simply) and therefore the result set cardinality is the number of rows returned.