Chapter-1

ORACLE: The Company And The Software.

1.1 oracle corporation: A timeline

• 1977: Larry Ellison and friends(Bob miner & Ed Oates founded

Software Development Laboratories. CIA-USA wants its large data to
be organised and accessed quickly and bid for this project was
awarded to SDL and name of project was ORACLE- which means
prophecy i.e. the god’s man who make correct predictions. But latter in
’77 CIA canceled funding to oracle
• origin of scott/tiger
bruce scott: name of developer
tiger : his cat 
• 1978: oracle V1 was written and released. It was written in assembly
language on PDP-11 under RSX-OS.but this version was never
relesed out.
• 1979: SDL changed its company-name to "Relational Software, Inc."
(RSI) and introduced its product Oracle V2 as an early commercially-
available relational database system. The version did not support
transactions, but implemented the basic SQL functionality of queries
and joins. (RSI never released a version 1 - instead calling the first
version version 2 as a marketing gimmick.)[27]
• 1982: RSI in its turn changed its name, becoming known as "Oracle
Corporation",[28] to align itself more closely with its flagship product.
• 1983: The company released Oracle version 3, which it had re-written
using the C programming language and which supported COMMIT and
ROLLBACK functionality for transactions. Version 3 extended platform
support from the existing Digital VAX/VMS systems to include Unix
environments. Oracle opens first international office at oracle
denmark.
• 1984: Oracle Corporation released Oracle version 4, which supported
read-consistency. Oracle moves ot 20 davis drive,redwood city, CA
• 1985: Oracle Corporation released Oracle version 5, which supported
the client-server model — a sign of networks becoming more widely
available in the mid-1980s.
• 1986: Oracle version 5.1 started supporting distributed queries.
• 1987: comapnay sales reaches $131 million. Larry ellison is still
personaly interviewing every candidate before a job offer is made.
• 1988: Oracle RDBMS version 6 came out with support for PL/SQL
embedded within Oracle Forms v3 (version 6 could not store PL/SQL in
the database proper), row-level locking and hot backups . oracle
moves ot present HQ : 500 oracle parkway, redwood city - CA
 • 1989: Oracle Corporation entered the application products market and
developed its ERP product, (later to become part of the Oracle E-
Business Suite), based on the Oracle relational database .
• 1990: the release of Oracle Applications release 8[28]
• 1992: Oracle version 7 appeared with support for referential integrity,
stored procedures and triggers.
• 1997: Oracle Corporation released version 8, which supported object-
oriented development and multimedia applications.
• 1999: The release of Oracle8i aimed to provide a database inter-
operating better with the Internet (the i in the name stands for
"Internet"). The Oracle 8i database incorporated a native Java virtual
machine (Oracle JVM).
• 2000: Oracle E-Business Suite 11i pioneers integrated enterprise
application software[28]
• 2001: Oracle9i went into release with 400 new features, including the
ability to read and write XML documents. 9i also provided an option for
Oracle RAC, or "Real Application Clusters", a computer-cluster
database, as a replacement for the Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) option.
• 2003: Oracle Corporation released Oracle Database 10g. (The g stands
for "grid"; emphasizing a marketing thrust of presenting 10g as "grid-
computing ready".)
• 2005: Oracle Database 10.2.0.1 — also known as Oracle Database 10g
Release 2 (10gR2) — appeared.
• 2006: Oracle Corporation announces Unbreakable Linux[28]
• 2007: Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Sets New World Record TPC-H
3000 GB Benchmark Result[30]
• 2007: Oracle Corporation released Oracle Database 11g for Linux and
for Microsoft Windows.
• 2008: Oracle Corporation acquires BEA Systems.
• 2009: Oracle Corporation acquires Sun Microsystems.

Competitors

Oracle's main competitors in the database business are:

• Microsoft SQL Server

• IBM with DB2 and Informix
• Sybase with their Sybase System
• CA with Ingres
• Software AG with ADABAS and MaxDB
Open source databases (free, but normally way behind their commercial
equivalents):

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• EnterpriseDB

Oracle's main competitors in the middleware/ application servers business

are:

• IBM WebSphere
• BEA WebLogic (until January 2008 when they bought the company)

Oracle's main competitors in the applications business are:

• SAP R/3

Online support for oracle

www.metalink.oracle.com
www.otn.oracle.com.index.html
www.oracle.com/appsnet/index.html
www.orafans.com
www.oracle.com.oramag/index.html
www.ixora.com.au/home.htm
www.comp.databases.oracle.server
www.comp.databases.oracle.tool
www.technet.oracle.com/docs/content.html
www.oradoc.com/index.html