Oracle Database History — First Commercially Successful Relational DBMS

Until the mid-1970s, information in databases was distributed according to the old hierarchical, or "tree", principle, which is still used in desktop operating systems.

The first prototypes of relational DBMS already existed in the 70s of the twentieth century. However, few people believed in the possibility of achieving effective implementation of such systems. However, by the end of the 1980s, relational systems dominated the global DBMS market.
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In this regard, many companies began to position their DBMS as "relational" for promotional purposes. But they did not always have sufficient grounds for this. Therefore, the author of the relational data model, Edgar Codd, in 1985 published his famous “12 Codd Rules” , which each RDBMS must satisfy.

One of the first prototypes of relational databases was System R. This is a project of IBM, which appeared in 1976. He inspired the future founders of Oracle to create their own relational database. , but he never received commercial success.

Chief among the creators of Oracle was Larry Ellison, who along with Bob Miner and Ed Oates before Oracle worked on a project for the CIA. A number of sources say that he was given the code name "Oracle". In 1977, a young programmer Larry Ellison dropped out of his studies at Yale University to start his own business. Larry Ellison had only $ 1,200 at the time. He persuaded to invest the above two friends, but the starting capital of this increased by only $ 500.



On June 16, 1977, Software Development Laboratories, soon renamed Relational Software Inc., was founded by Ed Oates, Bob Miner, and Larry Ellison in California (USA). Young programmers began to develop a database management system (DBMS) built on the principles of relational algebra.

Oracle 2

The first commercial version of the Oracle DBMS was named Oracle 2. Such a move should have let customers know that the system is reliable and even passed the test of time.

In the late 70s, the main competitive advantage of Oracle DBMS was the high speed of processing vast amounts of information, which all experts noted. Unlike System R, which required a powerful supercomputer - mainframe, Oracle 2 handled the processing of information on more “miniature” machines. These and other advantages led to the fact that in the early 80s the DBMS began to spread rapidly.

Ellison and his colleagues have had difficulty implementing compatibility with the IBM System R. DBMS. IBM’s unwillingness to disclose source codes has become a key issue. As a result, compatibility between the two systems has not been achieved.

Larry Ellison - Oracle Founder

Oracle has become historically the first and one of the most advanced implementations of the client / server architecture. Portability and scalability have always had a high priority among Oracle developers. This played a key role in the success of the company in the database market.

Oracle 2 ran on the PDP-11 mini-computer from Digital Equipment in the RSX-11 operating environment. Most of Oracle was written in assembler PDP-11, and individual components in the new C language of that time. Already in those days the system was portable and worked in other PDP-11 operating environments: IAS, RSTS and UNIX. At the same time, it was decided to transfer Oracle to the new VMS OS. Due to this, Oracle DBMS has occupied an extensive niche of corporate information systems in the rapidly growing VAX market.

Another important feature of the system was the full implementation of the capabilities of the new SQL query language - subqueries, a join operation, and so on. Due to this, the productivity of SQL programmers has increased many times.

Standard SQL (IBM) has been extended with CONNECT BY, which allows the processing of tree structures, which is unique to SQL systems.

Of course, it was necessary to work on the DBMS for a long time. In Oracle 2, for example, transactions were not supported: if the database update process failed, the previous state of the database could not be restored. Therefore, users were often forced to make backup copies of the database in order to avoid loss of information.

On October 29, 1982, the company was renamed Oracle Systems.

Oracle 3 and 4

In 1983, Oracle 3 entered the market. It was completely rewritten in C. This largely helped solve the portability problem of Oracle on a wide range of platforms - there were at least 20 then. In addition, atomic execution of transactions was implemented: the operation was either completely completed either it was not executed at all, respectively, the transaction either completed successfully on all changes in the database, or rolled back all the changes made by it.



With the release of Oracle 4, the system was ported to large computers with VM OS and MVS, as well as to a personal computer with 640 kilobytes of RAM.

A database access control model was also implemented, which ensured that the result of the query did not contradict the state of the database at the beginning of the query. Due to this, the known contradiction between the processes of reading and writing was eliminated.

Oracle 5

In 1985, Oracle released version 5.0, which first introduced the client / server architecture. In addition, the company released SQL * Net, a network product that provides a transparent connection between a client and a database or between two databases.

In version 5.1, distributed queries were first implemented — this made it possible to access data physically located in different nodes. Several interacting servers could create a user of many physically separated databases with the illusion of a single logical database.

March 12, 1986 was the initial public offering of shares of Oracle Corporation. Oracle’s high growth rate allowed an IPO with a profit of $ 55 million in 1986, and in just three years it could double its profit to $ 584 million.

Oracle 6

The developers of version 6 sought to create a tool for constructing large-scale information systems focused on real-time transaction processing.

Sequence generators and record level locking have been introduced. At the same time, Oracle became the first multi-user network database server for OS / 2, Xenix, Banyan Vines and Macintosh.

In version 6, fundamentally new features were introduced, fully realized later:

• SQL queries could be used in conjunction with the constructions of the PL / SQL procedural language and sent for execution to the server as anonymous procedures;
• PL / SQL was used in SQL * Forms as an application programming tool;
• In the syntax-level description of the database schema, declarative definitions of referential integrity constraints have been introduced (in accordance with the ANSI / ISO standard).

A crisis

In 1990, the company faced serious problems, reporting significant losses. Allison had to lay off more than 400 employees to cut costs. He also dismissed almost all of the top management, among whom were people close to Larry, who for 10 years along with him increased the glory and well-being of Oracle. Larry left in the company of Bob Miner, who was always considered a gifted programmer and just a good kind person.

Such tough methods Larry explained as follows:

“We were the fastest growing company in the history of the computer industry, but suddenly we were stumped and began to beat our heads against the wall,” he said. - We have achieved billions in revenue, but we have encountered practically intractable management problems. The fact is that the people who managed the billionth company remained the same as when our company was worth $ 15 million. I experienced an incredible feeling of appreciation to all who worked with me, to all with whom we created Oracle. But I had no choice. I had to fire them, realizing that if this was not done, then soon there would simply be no Oracle. I felt, above all, responsibility before the whole company, before all the staff, all shareholders and customers.

In addition, because of the mistakes made in the registration of sales and accounting of transactions that have not yet been completed in accounting documents, Oracle had difficulties with regulators in the local market.

As a result, Oracle was close to bankruptcy, and competitors such as Informix and Sybase began to slowly increase their market share.

At that time, competition between major market players reached its climax - the 90s could be remembered by many, like the period of the advertising war between Oracle and Informix. So, the latter bought the billboard next to the Oracle office and placed on it the inscription “Caution, dinosaurs cross the road”, hinting at outdated Oracle technologies.



However, Larry nevertheless found a solution: he formed a new managerial staff that was “pulled” on huge production volumes and fierce competition. As a result, after a certain time, Oracle has returned to its former heights.

And in 1992, the release of Oracle 7 finally changed the situation for the better.

Oracle 7

In addition to a general increase in I / O efficiency, CPU utilization and memory handling, the Oracle 7 DBMS version had a number of innovative architectural solutions:

• shared SQL cache on the server: the server recognizes the SQL requests sent by clients that were previously analyzed and compiled and are currently in the cache memory, which saves analysis, optimization and translation time, as well as the memory required for storage SQL queries;
• shared pool of server processes instead of a separate process for each client, which saves a significant amount of memory.

In the area of ​​database administration, a number of innovations were also introduced: a mirror transaction log, dynamic data log creation, the ANALYZE command, which allows collecting statistics on the use of tables, indexes and other physical objects, user profiles for using system resources — CPU, I / O, and so on Further.

Version 7 fully implemented declarative referential integrity constraints in accordance with ANSI / ISO standards. Within these limitations (primary and foreign keys), the user could specify the cascading deletion of records associated with a certain primary key. PL / SQL procedures could be described at the database schema level (stored procedures) and called by any application, other procedures, or triggers.

Another major innovation is database triggers.

A trigger is a pair (event + action), where an event is the removal / insertion / updating of table entries, and an action (trigger body) is a PL / SQL procedure performed when an event is made.

Triggers can be defined at the level of operations (DELETE, INSERT, UPDATE) or at the level of individual rows (FOR-EACH-ROW-triggers, which, moreover, can work with old and new values ​​of strings). With the help of triggers, you can implement complex rules for monitoring integrity, access rights, displaying values, and so on.

Security and integrity management has been greatly simplified by the introduction of roles.

A role is a collection of access rights to database objects (INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT, etc.) and system rights (CREATE TABLE, ALTER SYSTEM, and so on). Having defined the role, the database administrator can, with the help of one command, give the user privileges to work with some application.

In 1994, the company released a version of Oracle 7.1, including for the IBM PC. Previously, Oracle did not consider this platform as a server platform, but was limited to creating its client parts for its database for it.

In Oracle 7.1, the parallel query option appeared, as well as the ability to determine the number of server processes required to execute a SQL query based on the results of the query optimizer. In this version, complete PL / SQL and SQL integration was achieved, the built-in DBMS_SQL package and asynchronous symmetric data replication were introduced along with the asynchronous call of remote procedures.

In 1994, the first Oracle official representative, Andreas Hart, appeared in Russia. At the same time, such powerful structures as the Federal Security Service, the Cabinet of Ministers, Mosprivatization, the Ministry of Railways, RAO UES and so on became customers of Oracle in Russia.

Oracle 8 and 9

In 1997, version 8 was released, in which the object model, new features and administrative tools appeared. Oracle 8.0 was more reliable than the previous version, it was more resistant to high loads. In addition, it implemented the ability to partition tables.

In 1998, the company announced Oracle 8i Release 1 (8.1.5). The letter "i" means that the version has Internet support.



Starting with Oracle 8.1.5, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) built into the DBMS appears in subsequent versions. Next came the release of Oracle 8i Release 2 (8.1.6), which supported XML, and also contained certain innovations related to the creation of data warehouses.

In 2001, a version of Oracle 9i Release 1 (9.0.1) appeared, in which more than 400 changes were made over the previous one. Among them - the "intellectualization" of automated systems and the expansion of opportunities for analytics.



The new version introduces XML processing tools, Oracle RAC technology (Real Application Clusters) as a replacement for Oracle Parallel Server (OPS), the Oracle Streams replication creation mechanism, a scrollable cursor for C and C ++ programs, OLAP and Data support built into the DBMS. Mining, renaming columns and integrity constraints, support for Java 1.3.1 and Unicode 3.1.

Best financial years

According to the Giga Information Group (The RDBMS Market: An Update, April 2001), the total volume of the DBMS market in 2000 increased by 20% compared with 1999 and amounted to $ 8.8 billion in money terms. The main factors of development: e-commerce support, data warehousing support and server consolidation.


Approximate division of the market of a DBMS for the Unix platform.


Approximate division of the DBMS market for the Windows NT platform.

In 2004, the Oracle 10g Release 1 (10.1.0) version appeared. The letter “g” in the name means “Grid” (“network”) and symbolizes support for grid computing.

This year was one of the most successful in the history of the company - the rate of profit was 38% (the highest figure since the corporation’s existence), the annual turnover increased to 7% ($ 10.2 billion), software sales revenues rose by 12% ($ 8 , 1 billion), net profit rose 16% ($ 2.7 billion).



The Oracle office in Russia and the CIS was one of the three best representative offices of Oracle in terms of growth rates in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa), and for the fifth year in a row - among the top five among 145 Oracle representatives in the world.

To the present day

In 2005, Oracle 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.1) was announced. And in 2007, Oracle 11g Release 1 (11.1.0.6).


The state of the DBMS market for 2007

In 2009, the company released Oracle 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.1). The new version for Oracle introduced the possibility of “hot” (without stopping the server) making changes to metadata and business logic on PL / SQL - this became possible due to the mechanism of simultaneous support of several versions of the schema and logic called editions.

2013 - version 12c (12.1.0.1) is released, the main innovation is pluggable database support, which provides multi-grant properties and live database migration, the “c” suffix in the name means cloud.

On April 24, 2015, it became known about Oracle’s plans to transfer almost all of its products to the cloud. Thus, the American company decided to change its business model to match the changes in the market.



In September 2016, Larry Ellison announced the creation of a second-generation IaaS data centers at Oracle and announced that Amazon’s leadership in the cloud market is coming to an end. The company's goal is to offer Oracle customers a package of services where IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (“software as a service”) will be combined.