Oracle Database : History

Oracle Corporation was founded in 1977 by Lawrence Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates with initial capital of 1400 US Dollars. At the beginning the company was called Software Development Laboratories (SDL), later Relational Software, Inc. And only in 1983 the name was changed to Oracle Corporation in favour of its most successful product Oracle RDBMS (at that time there was already database version 3).

Why Oracle?
The name Oracle comes from the code name of a CIA project where Larry Ellison worked. After some time the project was stopped,  then Larry decided to start his own business using obviously similar name.

Interesting facts about Oracle database?
A well-known test database user called SCOTT was taken from the name of the first employee of Oracle Corp.
The password tiger is because his daughter's cat was named Tiger

Version numbering
Oracle products follow a custom release numbering and naming convention. With the Oracle RDBMS 10g release, Oracle Corporation began using the "10g" label in all versions of its major products, although some sources refer to Oracle Applications Release 11i as Oracle 11i. The suffixes "i", "g" and "c" do not actually represent a low-order part of the version number, as letters typically represent in software industry version numbering; that is, there is no predecessor version of Oracle 10g called Oracle 10f. Instead, the letters stand for "internet", "grid computing" and "cloud", respectively.

1979 - Oracle release 2
The first commercial RDBMS was built using PDP-11 assembler language. Although they created a commercial version of RDBMS in 1977, it wasn't available for sale until 1979 with the launch of Oracle version 2. USA Air Force and then CIA were the first customers to use Oracle 2.

1983 - Oracle release 3
The Oracle version 3 was developed in 1983. This version was assembled using C programming language and could run in mainframes, minicomputers, and PCs ? or any hardware with a C compiler. It supported the execution of SQL statements and transactions

1984 - Oracle release 4
Despite the advances introduced in version 3, demand was so great that Oracle was compelled to improve the software even further with the release of version 4 in 1984. Oracle version 4 included support for reading consistency, which made it much faster than any previous version.  Oracle version 4 also brought us the introduction of the export/import utilities and the report writer, which allows one the ability to create a report based on a query.

1985 - Oracle release 5
With the introduction of version 5 in 1985, Oracle addressed the increasing use of the internet in business computing.  This version was equipped with the capability to connect clients? software through a network to a database server.Oracle version 5 added some new security features such as auditing, which would help determine who and when someone accessed the database.

1988 - Oracle release 6

The PL/SQL language came with Oracle version 6 in 1988.  This version provided a host of new features including the support of OLTP high-speed systems, hot backup capability and row level locking ? which locks only the row or rows being used during a writing operation, rather than locking an entire table.  Prior to the hot backup feature, database administrators were required to shutdown the database to back it up.  Once the hot backup feature was introduced, DBA?s could do a backup while the database was still online

1992 - Oracle release 7

1992 was a memorable year for Oracle.  The company announced Oracle version 7, which was the culmination of four years of hard work and two years of customer testing before release to market.  This version of Oracle provided a vast array of new features  and capabilities in areas such as security, administration, development, and performance.  Oracle 7 also addressed security concerns by providing full control of who, when, and what users were doing in the database. Version 7 also allowed us to monitor every command, the use of privileges and the users access to a particular item. With Oracle 7 users could use stored procedures and had triggers to enforce business-rules. Roles were created at this version to make the security maintenance easier for users and privileges. The two-phase commit was added to support distributed transactions

1997 - Oracle release 8

The Oracle 8 Database was launched in 1997 and was designed to work with Oracle's network computer (NC). This version supported Java, HTML and OLTP. 

1998 - Oracle release 8i

Just one year later Oracle released Oracle 8i which was the first database to support Web technologies such as Java and HTTP.

2001 - Oracle release 9i

Oracle Real Application Cluster came with Oracle 9i Database in 2001. This feature provides software for clustering and high availability in Oracle database environments.  Supporting native XML was also a new feature of Oracle 9i and this was the first relational database to have these characteristics. Despite the fact that hard disks were becoming  cheaper, data was increasing very quickly in databases and Oracle 9i came with a special technology named table compression that reduced  the size of tables by  3 to 10 times  and increased the performance  when accessing those tables.

2003 - Oracle release 10g

Although Oracle 9i had only been in the market for two years, Oracle launched version 10g in 2003.  The release of 10g brought us the introduction to Grid Computing technology. Data centers could now share hardware resources, thus lowering the cost of computing infrastructure.  10g was also the first Oracle version to support 64-bit on Linux.  With Oracle Database 10g and Real Application Cluster it was now possible to move from very expensive SMP boxes and mainframes to an infrastructure that relies on low costs such as UNIX or Windows servers, which have high availability, scalability and performance.

2007 - Oracle release 11g

Oracle launched version 11g which was released on July 11th 2007. This version introduced more features than any other in Oracle history.  

This version includes:

Oracle Database Replay, a tool that captures SQL statements and lets you replay them all in another database to test the changes before you actually apply them on a production database;

Parallel Backups on same file using RMAN and many others. and many more….

2013 - Oracle release 12c

The latest version of Oracle 12c which was released on July 1st 2013. The world's first database designed for the cloud. It features a new multi-tenant option that will help organizations to consolidate databases into private

References:
https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/CNCPT/intro.htm
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_history_oracle.htm