History

Corporate/technical timeline

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• 1979: Larry Ellison and friends founded Software Development Laboratories.
• 1979: SDL changed its company-name to "Relational Software, Inc." (RSI) and introduced its product Oracle V2 as an early commercially-available relational database system. The version did not support transactions, but implemented the basic SQL functionality of queries and joins. (RSI never released a version 1 - instead calling the first version version 2 as a marketing gimmick.)^[19]
• 1982: RSI in its turn changed its name, becoming known as "Oracle Corporation",^[20] to align itself more closely with its flagship product.
• 1983: The company released Oracle version 3, which it had re-written using the C programming language and which supported COMMIT and ROLLBACK functionality for transactions. Version 3 extended platform support from the existing Digital VAX/VMS systems to include Unix environments.^[20]
• 1984: Oracle Corporation released Oracle version 4, which supported read-consistency.
• 1985: Oracle Corporation released Oracle version 5, which supporting the client-server model, with networks becoming more widely available in the mid-1980s.
• 1986: Oracle version 5.1 supported distributed queries.
• 1988: Oracle RDBMS version 6 came out with support for PL/SQL embedded within Oracle Forms v3 (version 6 could not store PL/SQL in the database proper), row-level locking and hot backups.^[21]
• 1989: Oracle Corporation entered the application products market and developed its ERP product, (later to become part of the Oracle E-Business Suite), based on the Oracle relational database.
• 1990: the release of Oracle Applications release 8^[20]
• 1992: Oracle version 7 appeared with support for referential integrity, stored procedures and triggers.
• 1997: Oracle Corporation released version 8, which supported object-oriented development and multimedia applications.
• 1999: The release of Oracle8i aimed to provide a database inter-operating better with the Internet (the i in the name stands for "Internet"). The Oracle 8i database incorporated a native Java virtual machine (Oracle JVM).
• 2000: Oracle E-Business Suite 11i pioneers integrated enterprise application software^[20]
• 2001: Oracle9i went into release with 400 new features, including the ability to read and write XML documents. 9i also provided an option for Oracle RAC, or "Real Application Clusters", a computer-cluster database, as a replacement for the Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) option.
• 2003: Oracle Corporation released Oracle Database 10g. (The g stands for "grid"; emphasizing a marketing thrust of presenting 10g as "grid-computing ready".)
• 2005: Oracle Database 10.2.0.1 — also known as Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10gR2) — appeared.
• 2006: Oracle Corporation announces Unbreakable Linux^[20]
• 2007: Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Sets New World Record TPC-H 3000 GB Benchmark Result^[22]
• 2007: Oracle Corporation released Oracle Database 11g for Linux and for Microsoft Windows.
• 2008: Oracle Corporation acquires BEA Systems.