History Of Oracle Database

Here is the list of important events that took place in the last 30 years of Oracle history. Oracle is celebrating its 30 wonderful years in the industry (from 1977 to 2007).

This article was updated on 6th August, 2007.

Important Events

In 1977, Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates founded Software Development Laboratories to undertake development work
After reading a paper by Codd in IBM Journal of Research and Development, they created Oracle. The first version was never released. It was written in Assembly language of PDP which ran in 128kb of RAM.
Version 2.0 of Oracle was released in 1979 and it became first commercial relational database and first SQL database. The company changed its name to Relational Software Inc. (RSI).
In 1981, RSI started developing tools for Oracle.
In 1982, RSI was renamed to Oracle Corporation. It held its first user conference in San Francisco.
In 1983, Oracle released version 3.0, which was rewritten in C language and ran on multiple platforms.
In 1984, Oracle version 4.0 was released. It contained features like concurrency control - multi-version read consistency etc.
By 1985, Oracle released version 5.0 and became the first relational database that worked in client/server environment.
In 1986, Oracle goes public on the NASDAQ exchange.
In 1987, Oracle wanted to create enterprise applications that take advantage of their database.
In 1988, Oracle version 6.0 was released. It provided row-level locking, hot backup and PL/SQL as main features.
By 1989, Oracle moved to new headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.
In 1990, they released Oracle Applications Release 8, which included account software for client/server
In 1992, they released Oracle 7.0. It provided better performance, administrative utilities, application development tools, security features, stored procedures, triggers and declarative integrity.
In 1995, Oracle became the first major company to announce a comprehensive internet strategy.
In 1997, Oracle released Oracle 8.0 and Oracle Applications 10.7. It started embracing Java. Partitioning, support for different types of data like images, large text, external data etc.(lobs) are provided. It also started providing support for Object in database becoming an Object-Relational DBMS
By 1999, Oracle realized that "Internet Changes Everything". Oracle released Oracle 8i and Oracle Applications 11i. They supported open standards like XML. Oracle8i provided Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to run Java program in Oracle Database and also scalability, which was required for internet databases.
In 2000, Oracle9iAS was released. Oracle corporation is no longer a company providing only database management system and instead started providing all that it takes to develop and deploy a complete application. AS(Application Server) runs on middle tier in 3-tier Client/Server architecture boosting the performance.
In 2001, Oracle9i was released. It allows Oracle to run on RAC (Real Application Cluster), which is a collection of low-cost servers. It also allowed XML documents to be stored and queried in Oracle Database.
In 2003, Oracle10g was released, where g stands for Grid computing, which servers computing power across the enterprise as a utility, automatically shifting processing load based on demand. Oracle10g also made a lot of administrative tasks automatic.
In 2007, Oracle has released Oracle11g. The new version focused on better partitioning, easy migration etc.

As of now, Oracle has 68,000 employees, 2,75,000 customer with US$14 billion revenue. It is run by Larry Ellison (CEO), Charles Phillips(president),Safra Catz (president and CFO).

Oracle's philosophy, according to Ken Jacobs, vice president of product strategy is, "Nothing is impossible. Impossible just takes a little longer".