Understanding Oracle

Oracle

History

IBM was the first company to develop a RDBMS, however, Oracle Corporation made history in 1980 by releasing its RDBMS, Oracle, for commercial use. Just a few years later the company would release a version of its system for IBM computers. Since its exhibition to the RDBMS market, Oracle has consistently led the way. According to Gartner, Oracle owned nearly 50% of the RDBMS market in 2011. In addition to opening up the commercial market for RDBMS, the Oracle Corporation also was the first company to develop a commercial-level version of SQL that was designed to manipulate data in a RDBMS using (at that time) queries and joins.

Features

The first “real” release of the Oracle RDBMS was Oracle 2. This system supported only basic SQL features, and it was written in an assembly language. The following year, and for the next 10 years or so, Oracle Corporation released updates to its flagship database. Probably one of the reasons the Oracle RDBMS has managed to remain at the top of mighty RDBMS is linked to its product updates that are closely tied to changes in the market. Database buzzwords such as “scalable”, “programmable”, “distributed”, and “portable” are also tied to Oracle release. For example, in 1985 support for a client-server model was added in anticipation of a growing acceptance of network communication. As the Internet paved the way for the Digital Era, the Oracle RDBMS was updated to include a native Java virtual machine (JVM).

Oracle Database 12c is the most recent release of the RDBMS, and it includes the following features:

• New data redaction to enhance security of sensitive data
• Introduction of Oracle Advanced Analytics platform
• New database handling for archiving Flash Data Archive (FDA)
• Support for integrating with operating system processor groups
• Support for data pump for database consolidation
• Several enhancements to Oracle Application Express, a rapid-development tool that allows users to develop Web apps using SQL and/or PL/SQL.
• Advanced network compression to enhance performance