Little known facts about Oracle

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• Oracle is ranked among the 10 best companies for a six-month return on equity.

• Oracle's relational database was the world's first to support the Structured Query Language, now an industry standard.

• Today, the Oracle DBMS is supported on over 80 different operating environments, ranging from IBM mainframes and DEC VAX minicomputers, to UNIX-based minicomputers and Windows NT platforms.

• Oracle spends nearly 13% of their revenues for research and development.

• Oracle V1 ran on PDP-11 under RSX, 128 KB max memory and was written in assembly language.
  

• Oracle created the first database to run on a massively parallel computer.
  

• All 10 of the world's largest Web sites- from Amazon.com to Yahoo! - use Oracle. 65% of the Fortune 100 use Oracle for e-business.

Oracle: Past, Present and Future

The Beginnings.

When CEO Lawrence J. Ellison and a few associates formed Oracle in 1977, they were out to prove wrong the prevailing theory that relationship databases could not be commercially viable.

Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates found Software Development Laboratories. Inspired by a research paper written in 1970 by an IBM researcher titled " A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", the three decide to build a new type of database called a relational database system. Their orginal project is for the government and is titled Oracle. The founders believe that Oracle, meaning source of wisdom, would be an appropriate name for their project and receive permission from the CIA to use it.

What's in a name?

In 1978, Software Development Laboratories moved from their office in Santa Clara to a new one on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the heart of Silicon Valley. In an attempt to explain what their company does, they changed their name to Relational Software Inc., or RSI. The newly-christened company shipped its first commercial SQL-based database, V2, in 1979 (V1 was never officially released). In 1982 RSI changed its name to Oracle Systems Corporation, which later become Oracle Corporation.

Tapping the Internet.

In 1983, Oracle decided to make RDBMS portable, and introduced V3 - the first portable database to run on PCs, mini computers and mainframes. Today, Oracle targets high-end workstations and mini computers as the server platforms on which to run its database systems. Along with few others, Oracle has long been a champion of network computers. It now boasts that is was the world's first software company to develop and deploy 100 percent Internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, server, enterprise business applications, applications development and decision support tools. In fact, CEO Ellison has said, "If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden."

A phenomenal success story.

Today, as proof of their success, they've parlayed an initial $2,000 investment in the company into an annual revenue exceeding $10.1 billion. Based in Redwood shores, California, it has more that 43,000 employees worldwide and does business in over 150 countries. Oracle (ORCL) is publicly traded on the NASDAQ.

Oracle - Company Profile

Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. With annual revenues of more than $10.1 billion, the company offers its database, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education, and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world. Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Oracle is the first software company to develop and deploy 100 percent internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, server, enterprise business applications, and application development and decision support tools.

Oracle is the only company capable of implementing complete global e-business solutions that extend from front office customer relationship management to back office operational applications to platform infrastructure. Oracle software runs on PCs, workstations, minicomputers, mainframes and massively parallel computers, as well as on personal digital assistants and set-top devices. As more and more companies transform themselves into e-businesses, Oracle's Internet-enabled solutions provide a cost-effective way to expand market opportunities, improve business process efficiencies, and attract and retain customers. By replacing expensive, unwieldy client/server computing models with the efficiency and reach of the internet, companies can deploy a wealth of innovative applications that can be accessed with a Web browser.

The only software company to offer a full suite of e-business products, Oracle provides:
• An Internet-ready platform for building and deploying Web-based applications
• A comprehensive suite of Internet-enabled business applications

• Professional services for help in formulating e-business strategy, as well as in designing, customizing, and implementing e-business solutions

What is Oracle's history?

1977 Relational Software Inc. (RSI - currently Oracle Corporation) established

1978 Oracle V1 ran on PDP-11 under RSX, 128 KB max memory. Written in assembly language. Implementation separated Oracle code and user code. Oracle V1 was never officially released.

1980 Oracle V2 released - the first commercially available relational database to use SQL. Oracle runs on on DEC PDP-11 machines. Coide is still written in PDP-11 assembly language, but now ran under Vax/VMS.

1982 Oracle V3 released, Oracle became the first DBMS to run on mainframes, minicomputers, and PC's (portable codebase). First release to employ transactional processing. Oracle V3's server code was written in C.

1983 Relational Software Inc. changed its name to Oracle Corporation.

1984 Oracle V4 released, introduced read consistency, was ported to multiple platforms, first interoperability between PC and server.

1986 Oracle V5 released. Featured true client/server, VAX-cluster support, and distributed queries. (first DBMS with distributed capabilities).

1987 CASE and 4GL toolset

1988 Oracle V6 released - PL/SQL introduced. Oracle Financial Applications built on relational database.

1989 Released Oracle 6.2 with Symmetric cluster access using the Oracle Parallel Server

1991 Reached power of 1,000 TPS on a parallel computing machine. First database to run on a massively parallel computer (Oracle Parallel Server).

1992 Released Oracle7 for Unix

1993 Rollout of Oracle's Cooperative Development Environment (CDE). Introduction of Oracle Industries and the Oracle Media Server.

1994 Oracle's headquarters moved to present location. Released Oracle 7.1 and Oracle7 for the PC.

1995 Reported gross revenues of almost $3 billion.

1995 OraFAQ.com website launched.

1997 Oracle8 released (supports more users, more data, higher availability, and object-relational features)

1998 Oracle announces support for the Intel Linux operating system

1999 Oracle8i (the "i" is for internet) or Oracle 8.1.5 with Java integration (JVM in the database)

2000 Oracle8i Release 2 released Oracle now not only the number one in Databases but also in ERP Applications Oracle9i Application Server generally available: Oracle tools integrated in middle tier

2001 Oracle9i Release 1 (with RAC and Advanced Analytic Service)

2002 Oracle9i Release 2

2004 Oracle10g Release 1 (10.1.0) available ("g" is for grid, the latest buzzword)

2005 The Oracle FAQ (this site) is 10 years old! Oracle10g Release 2 (10.2.0) available
Oracle release a free version of their database, Oracle XE (Express Edition)

In 2007, Oracle version 11g was released for the Linux operating system.

What is Oracle

OracleLarry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such).

I guess the first question is really, "What is a database"? A database is an organized collection of data. The data can be textual, like order or inventory data, or it can be pictures, programs or anything else that can be stored on a computer in binary form.

A relational database stores the data in the form of tables and columns. A table is the category of data, like Employee, and the columns are information about the category, like name or address.

Some databases have minimal feature sets and only store data, while others include programming languages, facilities and utilities to support enterprise-level applications like ERP and data warehousing. Oracle is the #1 database and has the most advanced feature set.

Oracle is made up of a set of processes running in your operating system. These processes manage how data is stored and how it is accessed. I will cover these processes in detail in the future; but for now we just need to understand that Oracle is a program that is running in the background, maintaining your data for you and figuring out where it should go on your hard drive.

In almost all relational databases, data is accessed through SQL, or Structured Query Language, and Oracle is no exception. SQL allows you to SELECT your data, INSERT new records, UPDATE existing records and DELETE records you want to get rid of. SQL can be embedded in other languages or you can run scripts of SQL directly against the database.

PL/SQL is the procedural language extension to SQL. PL/SQL is a programming language like C, Java or Pascal. In the Oracle world, there is no better way to access your data from inside a program. SQL can be natively embedded in PL/SQL programs. I will be using both SQL and PL/SQL very heavily in my future articles.

PL/SQL is a feature-rich language geared toward developing database applications. PL/SQL is the procedural language of the database, but it is also the procedural language for most of Oracle's tools. Programs that run inside the database are called stored procedures. These stored procedures are almost always PL/SQL, but can be written in Java.