Oracle Database
Oracle Database is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation.
It is a database commonly used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed 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.
Oracle Database uses SQL for database updating and retrieval.
History
and his two friends and former co-workers, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories in 1977, later Oracle Corporation. SDL developed the original version of the Oracle software. The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a Central Intelligence Agency-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by Ampex; the CIA was Oracle's first customer, and allowed the company to use the code name for the new product.Ellison wanted his database to be compatible with IBM System R, but that company's Don Chamberlin declined to release its error codes. By 1985 Oracle advertised, however, that "Programs written for SQL/DS or DB2 will run unmodified" on the many non-IBM mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers its database supported "Because all versions of ORACLE are identical".
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 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 Ellison "knew no one would want to buy version 1". For some database releases, Oracle also provides an Express Edition that is free to use.Oracle Database release numbering has used the following codes:
The includes a brief history on some of the key innovations introduced with each major release of Oracle Database.
See My Oracle Support note for the current Oracle Database releases and their patching end dates.
Patch updates and security alerts
Prior to Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation released Critical Patch Updates and Security Patch Updates 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 and Release Update Revisions. RUs usually contain security, regression, 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, and IBM's hardware divisions work closely with Oracle on performance-optimizing server-technologies. Niche commercial competitors include Teradata, 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.