OCI was released with Oracle DatabaseCorporation versionfirst 6released inOCI 1988.(under the At that time it was calledname HLI, the Host Language Interface) with Oracle Database version 6 in 1988. As HLI (and subsequently OCI) wereoperated as wrappers for UPI, their original naming conventions wereclosely quiteresembled similarthose toof the UPI calls they were based upon. An example is the [[Rollback (data management) | rollback]] statement; the call <code>upirol</code> in UPI became <code>orol</code> in OCI.
Later, in Oracle8 (released in 1997), OCI calls were given better,acquired more descriptive names; <code>orol</code> became <code>OCITransRollback</code>. Subsequent improvements have been made in every version of OCI, including 11g (released in 2007). Oracle Corporation [http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/oci/index.html claims] that OCI is ''"So reliable that every SQL statement in the Oracle Database executes with OCI".''
