and his two friends and former co-workers, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories in 1977. SDL developed the original version of the Oracle software. The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a CIA-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by Ampex.
Releases and versions
Oracle products follow a custom release-numbering and -naming convention. The "c" in the current release, Oracle Database 19c, stands for "Cloud". Previous releases 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's RDBMS release numbering has used the following codes: The includes a brief history on some of the key innovations introduced with each major release of Oracle Database.
Patch updates and security alerts
Oracle Corporation releases Critical Patch Updates or Security Patch Updates 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.
In the market for relational databases, Oracle Database competes against commercial products such as IBM's DB2 UDB and Microsoft SQL Server. 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 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, and IBM's hardware divisions work closely with Oracle on performance-optimizing server-technologies. Niche commercial competitors include Teradata, Software AG's ADABAS, Sybase, and IBM's Informix, among many others. Increasingly, the Oracle database products compete against such open-source software relational and non-relational database systems as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Couchbase, Neo4j and others. Oracle acquired Innobase, supplier of the InnoDB codebase to MySQL, in part to compete better against open source alternatives, and acquired Sun Microsystems, 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.
