Data storage structure
History
Software Development Laboratories was founded in 1977. In 1979 SDL changed its company name to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI) and introduced their product Oracle V2 as an early commercial relational database system. The version did not support transactions but implemented the basic SQL functionality of queries and joins. There was no version 1, instead the first version was called version 2 as a marketing strategy.
In 1983, RSI was renamed Oracle Corporation to more closely align itself with its flagship product. Oracle version 3 was released which had been re-written in the C Programming Language and supported commit and rollback transaction functionalities. Platform support was extended to UNIX with this version, which until then had run on Digital VAX/VMS systems.
In 1984, Oracle version 4 was released which supported read consistency.
Starting 1985, Oracle began supporting the Client-Server model, with networks becoming available in the mid 80s. Oracle version 5.0 supported distributed querying.
In 1988, Oracle entered the products market and developed its ERP product - Oracle Financials based on the Oracle Relational Database. Oracle version 6 was released with support for PL/SQL, row-level locking and hot backups.
In 1992, Oracle version 7 was released with support for integrity constraints, stored procedures and triggers.
In 1997, Oracle version 8 was released with support for object-oriented development and multimedia applications.
In 1999, Oracle 8i was released which is more in tune with the needs of the Internet (The i in the name stands for "Internet"). The database has a native Java Virtual Machine.
In 2001, Oracle 9i was released with 400 new features including the facilty to read and write XML documents.
In 2003, Oracle 10g was released. The g stands for "Grid"; one of the sales points of 10g is that it's "grid computing ready".
Version numbering conventions
Oracle's numbering conventions have confused many people; they warrant a brief explanation. Since version 8, Oracle's RDBMS release numbering has been as follows:
- Oracle 8: 8.0.0 - 8.0.6
- Oracle 8i: 8.1.5.0 - 8.1.7.4
- Oracle 9i: 9.0.1.0 - 9.0.1.4
- Oracle 9i: 9.2.0.1 - 9.2.0.5 (Latest current patchset as of May 2004)
- Oracle 10g
In addition to its powerful RDBMS, Oracle has released several related suites of applications. These have historically followed their own release numbering conventions. For example,
List of Firsts
- Oracle is the first database product tested to comply with the ANSI SQL standard.
- Oracle is the first database to incorporate a native JRE
- Oracle is the first commercial RDBMS to become available on Linux (August 1999)