It is a database commonly used for running online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and mixed (OLTP & DW) database workloads. Oracle Database is available by several service providers on-premises, on-cloud, or as a hybrid cloud installation. It may be run on third party servers as well as on Oracle hardware (Exadata on-premises, on Oracle Cloud or at Cloud at Customer).[5]
Oracle Database uses SQL for database updating and retrieval.[6]
History
Larry Ellison and his two friends and former co-workers, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977. SDL developed the original version of the Oracle software. The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a CIA-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by Ampex.[7]
Releases and versions
Oracle products follow a custom release-numbering and -naming convention. The "ai" in the current release, Oracle Database 23ai, stands for "Artificial Intelligence". Previous releases (e.g. Oracle Database 19c, 10g, and Oracle9i Database) have used suffixes of "c", "g", and "i" which stand for "Cloud", "Grid", and "Internet" respectively. Prior to the release of Oracle8i Database, no suffixes featured in Oracle Database naming conventions. There was no v1 of Oracle Database, as co-founder Larry Ellison "knew no one would want to buy version 1".[8] For some database releases, Oracle also provides an Express Edition (XE) that is free to use.[9]
Oracle Database release numbering has used the following codes:
Legend:
Old version, not maintained
Old version, still maintained
Latest version
Latest preview version
Future release
Oracle Database Version
Initial Release Version
Initial Release Date
Terminal Version
Marquee Features
Current stable version:Oracle Database 23ai
23.4.0
On May 2, 2024, Oracle Database 23ai[10] was released on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as cloud services, including OCI Exadata Database Service, OCI Exadata Database Cloud@Customer, and OCI Base Database Service. It is also available in Always Free Autonomous Database. Oracle Database 23c (previously released in 2023) was renamed to Oracle Database 23ai (23.4) due to the significant additional engineering effort to add features that bring AI capabilities to the data in Oracle Database.
Oracle Database 23c (23.2 and 23.3) was released in 2023:
April 2023 (Linux) Oracle Database Free - Developer Release[11]
September 2023 Oracle Database on Base Database Service[12]
AI Vector Search[13] (includes new Vector data type, Vector indexes, and Vector SQL operators/functions), JSON Relational Duality,[14] JSON Schema Validation, Transactional Microservices Support, OKafka, Operational Property Graphs, Support for SQL/PGQ, Schema Privileges, Developer Role, In-database SQL Firewall, TLS 1.3 Support, Integration with Azure Active Directory OAuth2, True Cache for mid-tier caching, Readable Per-PDB Standby, Globally Distributed Database with active-active RAFT-based replication, Real-time SQL Plan Management, Priority Transactions, SQL Syntax Simplification, Schema Annotations, Data Use Case Domains, Column Value Lock-free Reservations
Old version, yet still maintained: Oracle Database 21c
Row-level locking, scalability / performance, online backup and recovery, B*Tree indexes, PL/SQL executed from compiled programs (C etc.). First version available for Novell Netware 386.[26]
First commercially available SQL RDBMS. Basic SQL queries, simple joins[31] and CONNECT BY joins. Written in assembly language for the PDP-11 to run in 128KB of RAM.[32] Ran on PDP-11 and VAX/VMS in PDP-11 compatibility mode.
Legend:
Old version, not maintained
Old version, still maintained
Latest version
Latest preview version
Future release
The Introduction to Oracle Database includes a brief history on some of the key innovations introduced with each major release of Oracle Database.
Prior to Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation released Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) and Security Patch Updates (SPUs)[33] and Security Alerts to close security vulnerabilities. These releases are issued quarterly; some of these releases have updates issued prior to the next quarterly release.
Starting with Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation releases Release Updates (RUs) and Release Update Revisions (RURs).[34] RUs usually contain security, regression (bug), optimizer, and functional fixes which may include feature extensions as well. RURs include all fixes from their corresponding RU but only add new security and regression fixes. However, no new optimizer or functional fixes are included.
Competition
In the market for relational databases, Oracle Database competes against commercial products such as IBM Db2 and Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle and IBM tend to battle for the mid-range database market on Unix and Linux platforms, while Microsoft dominates the mid-range database market on Microsoft Windows platforms. However, since they share many of the same customers, Oracle and IBM tend to support each other's products in many middleware and application categories (for example: WebSphere, PeopleSoft, and Siebel SystemsCRM), and IBM's hardware divisions work closely[citation needed] with Oracle on performance-optimizing server-technologies (for example, Linux on IBM Z). Niche commercial competitors include Teradata (in data warehousing and business intelligence), Software AG's ADABAS, Sybase, and IBM's Informix, among many others.
In the cloud, Oracle Database competes against the database services of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Increasingly, the Oracle database products compete against open-source software relational and non-relational database systems such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Couchbase, Neo4j, ArangoDB and others. Oracle acquired Innobase, supplier of the InnoDB codebase to MySQL, in part to compete better against open source alternatives, and acquired Sun Microsystems, owner of MySQL, in 2010. Database products licensed as open-source are, by the legal terms of the Open Source Definition, free to distribute and free of royalty or other licensing fees.
^Departments of Informatics. "Oracle V2". Virtual Exhibitions in Informatics. University of Klagenfurt. Archived from the original on 30 September 2019. Retrieved 30 September 2019.
^Baransel, Emre (2013). Oracle Data Guard 11gR2 Administration Beginner's Guide. Packt Publishing Ltd. ISBN9781849687911. Archived from the original on 23 November 2016. Retrieved 15 January 2014. You should not get confused between Critical Patch Update (CPU) and Security Patch Update (SPU) as CPU terminology has been changed to SPU from October 2012.
