What is Oracle database (RDBMS)?
Oracle Database Server or sometimes called Oracle RDBMS or even simply Oracle is a world leading relational database management system produced by Oracle Corporation.
The company was founded in 1977 by Lawrence Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates with initial capital of 1400 US Dollars. At the beginning the company was called Software Development Laboratories (SDL), later Relational Software, Inc. And only in 1983 the name was changed to Oracle Corporation in favour of its most successful product Oracle RDBMS (at that time there was already database version 3).
The name Oracle comes from the code name of a CIA project where Larry Ellison worked. After some time the project was stopped, then Larry decided to start his own business using obviously similar name.
The origin of RDBMS idea
The idea about a relational database came to Ellison in 1972 from an article of Edgar Codd who worked in research laboratory of IBM at that time. The management of IBM did not realize a commercial benefit of such software at that time. In return, Oracle took an advantage of that idea and was the first company who presented the first commercially usable product on the market.
Roadmap of Oracle Database
First RDBMS version released in 1979 was called Oracle V2. Why not V1? There were two reasons for that: a concern that a version 1 would not awake potential customers’ interest and to show a pseudo- leadership compared to the competitors.
First version of RDBMS was created with assembler. Later it turned out that assembler was costly and inefficient. Later Pascal and Ada were considered as programming languages but the choice was made on “C” that only started gathering strength at that time. Another benefit of C was the lower license costs.
Over the last 35 years Oracle went through successful database release schedule. At the moment the actual version of Oracle database server is 18.104.22.168 that includes the following marquee features:
- Oracle Database In-Memory
- Oracle Big Data SQL
- Oracle JSON Document Store
- Oracle REST Data Services
- Improvements to Oracle Multitenant
- Advanced Index Compression
- Zone Maps
- Approximate Count Distinct
- Attribute Clustering
- Full Database Caching
- Rapid Home Provisioning
Read my another post on the detailed Roadmap of Oracle database releases.
Oracle is a leader in database competition
Oracle was, is and probably will be the leading worldwide relational database management system (RDBMS). The below graph represents the RDBMS software revenue of the leading companies.
Oracle database architecture (high level)
Just have a look below at the high level architecture of the latest Oracle database version 12c.
Why you prefer Oracle database
– Oracle is a database technology leader. Many of the new RDBMS things come from Oracle first.
– Oracle database is portable and available on different OS platforms including the same code base and documentation set.
– Oracle demonstrates the world’s fastest RDBMS performance on different platforms. Oracle database performance tuning is a big and interesting topic to discover though.
– Oracle database is truly scalable vertically (scale-in) and horizontally (scale-out) using own unique technologies like Oracle RAC and Data Guard .
– Oracle database a comprehensive software product with many tools, utilities and abilities that come along with the server. It has so many interesting things to learn!
– You can download Oracle database and play with it for free
Interesting facts about Oracle database
– A well-known test database user called SCOTT was taken from the name of the first employee of Oracle Corp.
I encourage my readers sharing the reasons of why you like Oracle database and interesting facts about Oracle RDBMS that I will include in this article.