Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

. It is a database commonly used for running online transaction processing (OLTP),

data warehousing In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integr ...

(DW) and mixed (OLTP & DW) database workloads. Oracle Database is available by several service providers on-prem, on-cloud, or as a hybrid cloud installation. It may be run on third party servers as well as on Oracle hardware ( Exadata on-prem, on Oracle Cloud or at Cloud at Customer).

History

Larry Ellison and his two friends and former co-workers,

Bob Miner Robert Nimrod Miner (December 23, 1941 – November 11, 1994) was an American businessman. He was the co-founder of Oracle Corporation and the producer of Oracle's relational database management system. From 1977 until 1992, Bob Miner led produ ...

and

Ed Oates Edward A. Oates (born 1946) is an American businessman. He co-founded Software Development Labs in August 1977 with Larry Ellison, and Bob Miner. Software Development Labs later became Oracle Corporation. Education and early employment 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 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by

Ampex Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence.AbramsoThe History ...

Releases and versions

Oracle products follow a custom release-numbering and -naming convention. The "c" in the current release, Oracle Database 21c, stands for "Cloud". Previous releases (e.g. Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Database) have used suffixes of "g" and "i" which stand for "Grid" and "Internet" respectively. Prior to the release of Oracle8i Database, no suffixes featured in Oracle Database naming conventions. Note that there was no v1 of Oracle Database, as co-founder Larry Ellison "knew no one would want to buy version 1". Oracle Database release numbering has used the following codes: Th
Introduction to Oracle Database
includes a brief history on some of the key innovations introduced with each major release of Oracle Database. See My Oracle Support (MOS) 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 (CPUs) and Security Patch Updates (SPUs) 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). 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.

Market position

A 2016

Gartner Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...

report claimed to show Oracle holding #1 RDBMS market share worldwide based on the revenue share ahead of its four closest competitors –

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

, IBM, SAP and

Teradata Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech ...

. A 2021

Magic Quadrant report named Oracle a leader in Cloud Database Management Systems.

Competition

In the market for relational databases, Oracle Database competes against commercial products such as IBM Db2 and

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

. 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 Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

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 IBM WebSphere refers to a brand of proprietary computer software products in the genre of enterprise software known as "application and integration middleware". These software products are used by end-users to create and integrate applications ...

, PeopleSoft, and

Siebel Systems Siebel Systems, Inc. () was a software company principally engaged in the design, development, marketing, and support of customer relationship management (CRM) applications—notably Siebel CRM. The company was founded by Thomas Siebel and Pat ...

CRM), and IBM's hardware divisions work closely with Oracle on performance-optimizing server-technologies (for example, Linux on IBM Z). Niche commercial competitors include

(in data warehousing and business intelligence), Software AG's ADABAS, Sybase, and IBM's

Informix IBM Informix is a product family within IBM's Information Management division that is centered on several relational database management system (RDBMS) offerings. The Informix products were originally developed by Informix Corporation, whose ...

, 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 such

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. ...

relational and non-relational database systems as PostgreSQL,

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the S ...

, Couchbase,

Neo4j Neo4j is a graph database management system developed by Neo4j, Inc. Described by its developers as an ACID-compliant transactional database with native graph storage and processing, Neo4j is available in a non-open-source "community edition" ...

ArangoDB ArangoDB is a free and open-source native graph database system developed by ArangoDB Inc. ArangoDB is a multi-model database system since it supports three data models (graphs, JSON documents, key/value) with one database core and a unified que ...

and others. Oracle acquired

Innobase Innobase was a Finnish company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. Innobase is best known for being the developer of the InnoDB transactional storage engine for the MySQL open source database system. From 2005 on, Innobase was a subsidiary of ...

, supplier of the InnoDB codebase to

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

, in part to compete better against open source alternatives, and acquired

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

, 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.

References

External links

Overview provided by Oracle Corporation
{{Oracle Client-server database management systems Relational database management systems Proprietary database management systems Database engines Relational database management software for Linux Cloud infrastructure Oracle Cloud Services