Milestones in the History of the Oracle Database (3/3)

In this three-part article, I will try to peek under the lid of one of the most successful IT companies in the world, delve into the background of the creation of its most famous database product, and I will not forget to analyze the individual milestones the company went through and through which it consequently influenced Internet users worldwide.

Databases in General

A database (or data base, from the English database) is a specific organized set of information stored on a storage medium. ^[1] The predecessors of classic databases were card indexes with paper binders, where individual data were organized, for example, by the first letter of the surname, or year of birth. Such databases, whose data were directly manipulated by humans, can still be seen in some hospitals or libraries.

The first step towards automating data processing is considered to be the eleventh US census (1890), to which we owe, without exaggeration, the creation of the first computers. The American-German statistician Herman Hollerith took charge of it. He improved the punch cards already widely used in the textile industry at that time and mechanized the analysis of the data stored on them. ^[2] A few years later, Herman Hollerith founded the company IBM, which operates in the information technology market to this day.

For another half-century, electromechanical machines were still used, until the rapid development of computers in the 1950s led to fully automated processing. Processor machine code was used for data manipulation. The next stage of development came in 1960 with the programming language COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language ^[3]), which was closer to plain English, but these were still not databases as we know them today.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s, i.e., more than eighty years after Hollerith’s US census, that the first hints of relational databases appeared after the publication of E. F. Codd’s article, where data began to be viewed as tables. In these years, the first version of the query language SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language, later renamed SQL), modifications of which we still use today, also began to be developed. ^[4]

The Birth and Early Years of Oracle

The founding of Oracle dates back to 1977, when the founding trio Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates (then still under the name SDL, Software Development Laboratories) developed a special data management program for the CIA under the code name “Oracle”. They saw huge potential in the project, and so two years later (after another name change to RSI, Relational Software, Inc.) they introduced the first commercially available relational database – Oracle V2. It could only handle basic queries and constructs, such as JOIN.

To better associate the company name with its main product, the company changed its name for the last time in 1982, this time to Oracle.