[Oracle] History of the Oracle ――oracle company legend

Oracle
[Oracle] History of the Oracle ――oracle company legend

Author: fenng
Date: Sep 09 2004

The origins of Oracle Company
It is hard to imagine the Oracle Company's saga starting with IBM.

1970 June, IBM researcher Edgar Cauter (Edgar Frank Codd) published the famous "relational model of large shared database data" on communications of ACM (A relational model of data fo R Large Shared Data Banks) paper. This is a turning point in the history of the database. You know, at that time, the database products of the hierarchical model and the mesh model were dominant in the market. Starting from this thesis, the prologue of the relational database software revolution is opened.

Although the relationship model theory was born as early as 1970, the introduction of relational database management software in the market has been delayed. The main reason is that many opponents think the relational database is too slow to compare with the hierarchical database at that time. It is funny that IBM started the System R project in 1973 to study the practical feasibility of relational databases, and did not launch such products in time, because IBM's IMS (the well-known hierarchical database) market is good, if the introduction of relational databases, Involves many of IBM's own interests. Moreover, IBM's vast and complex bureaucracy is far less flexible in its decisions.

Larry Ellison, in June 1977, co-founded a software development laboratory in Silicon Valley with Bob Miner and Ed Oates (Software Development Laboratories, SDL) Computer Company (predecessor of Oracle Company). At that time, Larry Ellison, a 32-Year-old, who had failed to graduate from three universities, was just a regular software engineer. At the beginning of the company, Miner was president, Oates as vice president, and Ellison, because of a contract, also work in another company. Not long ago, the first employee, Bruce Scott, who used Oracle database software, knew there was a Scott user, right? Yes, this Scott, as for Scott's user code tiger, the name of Scott's cat, joined in, and after miner and Oates got tired of that kind of contract development work, they decided to develop generic software, but they didn't know what kind of products they could develop. Oates first saw Edgar Cauter's famous paper, along with several other related articles, and recommended Ellison and miner to read it. Ellison and miner foresaw the great potential of the database software (followed by IBM, yes), so SDL began planning to build a commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS).

Soon they'll get a less-than-decent product, or, more specifically, a demo. According to Ellison and Miner, a CIA-funded project code they were working with in the former company, they named the product Oracle. Because they believe that ORACLE (the dictionary's interpretation has "Oracle, prophecy," meaning) is the source of all wisdom. 1979, SDL was renamed the Relationship Software Limited (relational Software,inc.,rsi), after all, the "Software Development laboratory" is not much like the name of a large company. In order to highlight the company's core products in 1983, RSI was renamed Oracle again.


Figure 1 Oracle Corporate headquarters in U.S. a glance

Development and expansion

RSI released a commercial Oracle product on the PDP-11 computer that was available for Dec in the summer of 1979, which consolidates a more complete SQL implementation, including subqueries, joins, and other features. But it has to be said that the software is not very stable and lacks the important functions such as transaction processing. For market strategy, the company claims this is the second edition of the product, but it is actually the first edition. It was named 2nd rather than 1th because Ellison thought potential customers preferred to buy the 2nd version rather than the original version. (although this is a bit dishonest, it's a very clever trick to admit.) There are still some companies that sell themselves to customers in a version called 1.0, Learning 1979 years of Oracle! Many years later, Oracle Corporation claims to be the first to provide the first SQL relational database management system.

Although the software is not very good, but the customer still has. The CIA can't wait to buy a set of such software to meet their needs. But after consulting IBM, they found that IBM had no commercially available products, and they contacted RSI. So RSI had the first client. At the time, government and military agencies tended to have several computers at the same time, and there was no "software portability", and, of course, there were few applications with such capabilities. In other words, Oracle databases developed for PDP-11 cannot be used on IBM hosts and Dec VAX. Soon the user will show the need: can Oracle run on different operating systems at the same time? This poses new challenges for RSI (mainly miner and Scott). In the late 70 and early 80, software was generally designed to run on a single operating system with few software portability.

March 1983, RSI released the third edition of Oracle. Miner and Scott went through the hard work of writing this version in C. You know, the C language was launched soon, use it to write Oracle software is also a certain risk, but in addition, there is no other way. It soon proved how correct it was to do so, and the C compiler was cheap and efficient. From now on, Oracle products have a key feature: portability. Oracle 3rd also introduced the "atomicity" ――sql statements for SQL statements and transactions either all succeed or all fail, and the transaction is either all committed or rolled back. Oracle 3rd also introduces non-blocking queries that use data stored in the "before image file" to query and roll back transactions, thereby avoiding the use of read lock (although its throughput is limited by using table-level locking). Also in 1983, IBM released a belated Database 2 (DB2), but it was only available on MVS. In any case, Oracle has taken the initiative.

Scott left Oracle when the third edition of development was not finished. At that time with C rewrite Oracle's pressure is very large, endless software debugging finally let Scott overwhelmed, chose to walk away. Give the rest of the burden to miner. After selling his shares of%4, Scott later created the Gupta Company (now renamed Centura Software) and Pointbase (which provides a pure Java embedded database), all of which are development and database-related products. Years later, when someone asked him about his Oracle shares, Scott, the tech whiz who wrote Oracle's first line of code, could only smile. If we can stick to it, it is a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. But Scott didn't have so many ideas at the time, he was just too tired.



Figure two, Bruce Scott is now one of the founders of Pointbase.

Oracle first ported its software to the VMS operating system on the DEC VAX computer. As early as 1979, the company has hired a DEC company's technical expert robot Brandt to carry on the VAX Oracle's development. At the beginning, the funds were limited, only to the University of California, Berkeley to rub the machine for development, and later better, but the machine is also borrowed. Despite all the difficulties, Brandt successfully completed the transplant work. Oracle software has become one of the most popular programs in VAX as VAX minicomputer sales and even demand. This is thanks to Larry's foresight of the market. If IBM is leading Oracle to the database ship, then DEC's vax is sailing with them. A few short years later, Oracle databases were ported to a variety of major platforms. Oracle products have also been the focus of potential customers for the key features of portability.

Oates, frustrated by the break-up of his marriage, has been unable to put all his energy into the company and have to leave the company. A few years later, he returned to the company to make a huge contribution to Oracle, and he made a promise to leave again when more than 10,000 employees were in the company. 1999, he fulfilled his wish. Now he is indulging himself in music and enjoying himself.

For a long period of time, the company's research and development by miner Bear sole responsibility. Miner as money as nothing, low-key, and Ellison the edge will be exposed to a sharp contrast. In the company, everyone agreed that he is good, he was also loved by the staff. Ellison is the company's brain, Miner is a well-deserved company's heart. He is a silent hero, just like Steve Wozniak behind Steve Jobs.

Oracle released its 4th edition of products in October 1984. The stability of the product finally got a certain enhancement, with miner words, reached the "industrial intensity." But it's not satisfying enough, and users ' complaints about the product seem endless. This edition adds read consistency, a key feature of the database, to ensure that users see consistent data during the query. That is, when a session is modifying data, other sessions will not see the uncommitted changes to the session. As you can see, the product is always unstable before Oracle Fourth edition, but Oracle's group of salespeople, mainly Ellison, is always exaggerating when it comes to promoting Oracle, but he is capable of selling the software and selling it well and has to admit that It's a little bit magical indeed. Let's take a look at the 1984 software market, in the database market, the Overlord is Asnton-tale company, their products are just launched soon dbase III (dbase is exactly the PC database software overlord), Just becoming the world's third-largest independent software company (first and second, Microsoft, Lotus,oracle), which was the year the Apple Macintosh was born, Steven Jobs challenged Big Brother IBM with this blockbuster. Also during the year, Oracle company developers have just ported products to PCs. It was the best of times and the worst of times. Thousands of small companies have struggled in the software world, and new companies have sprung up, how can Oracle be invincible?

In 1985, Oracle released version 5.0. Some users say this version is a stable version of the Oracle database. This is also the first batch of RDBMS products that can run in Client/server mode, and Oracle databases never lag behind in technology trends. This means that a business application running on a desktop PC (client) can access the database server over the network. The release 5.1 version of 1986 also supports distributed queries, allowing access to data stored in multiple locations through a one-time query.

It was in 1985, when the largest independent software company, Cullinet (the main sales network database), had fallen like a meteor. Oracle's main competitor is the Ingres database. Ingres was born at the University of California, Berkeley, and the main designer was the famous Professor Michael Stonebraker. It can be said that Ingres database software is the best technology database in the 80 's, and the rapid growth of Ingres market share has already put a lot of pressure on Oracle. Coincidentally, this time, IBM once again stretched out "hand of God."

Ingres uses query technology from Stonebraker's quel (query Language), which is very different from IBM's SQL. In some places quel even better than SQL. IBM was worried about Ingres turning quel into a standard would be bad for him. After a measure, decided to submit its own SQL to the database Standards Committee. Professor Stonebraker does not intend to submit quel to the Database Standards Committee, which he believes is actually stifling innovation. Sang, Yuwengdeli. Oracle sees and captures this great opportunity to make a big announcement about Oracle's overall compatibility with SQL, plus Oracle's attack on the Ingres PC version (weakening the opponent's edge, resolving its weaknesses), plus the strength of Oracle's sales, Ingres constantly lost the city, wait until the launch of the database to support SQL is too late. Keeping up with IBM allows Oracle to grow, grow, embrace standards, embrace openness, embrace change, and keep Oracle in an invincible position.

March 12, 1986, Oracle Company 15 U.S. dollars per share public listing, the day at 20.75 U.S. dollars closed, the company market value of 270 million U.S. dollars. March 13, Microsoft on the 21 U.S. dollars per share of the IPO, the closing price of 28 U.S. dollars, the company's market value of 700 million U.S. dollars. Far more than Oracle. The success of the halo of Microsoft and gates to cover the light of Oracle and Ellison, perhaps this is the beginning of Ellison hostile to Microsoft.



Figure three the wilder Larry Ellison

Suffer setbacks

Oracle 6th edition was released in 1988. Because of the past version of the performance of the repeatedly criticized, miner led the engineers to the core of the database has been rewritten. Introduces the important feature of row-level locks (row-level locking), that is, transactions that perform writes only lock the affected rows, not the entire table. This version introduces a pl/sql (procedural Language extension to SQL) language that is not yet perfect. The 6th edition also introduces the online hot backup feature, which enables the database to create online backups during use, greatly enhancing availability. In the same year, Oracle began to develop ERP software.

The company looks like it's going well, but the nightmare is just beginning.

Because of the lack of attention to software testing in the past-at that time the company is small, basically customers help free testing. After the release of the sixth edition, many of the users who couldn't wait to start using it complained. This is a product that has not been tested at all to release (also blame Ellison, boast always say in front, had to taste the bitter fruit). Users are starting to lash out at Oracle, and some of Oracle's rivals are starting to attack the weaknesses of Oracle products. Developers dealing with angry users, working overtime on a continuous revision of the program, finally got a more stable version, temporarily calming the user's anger.

However, the actual problem is not here, the rapid growth over the past few years has also brought huge risks to the company, the 1990 financial year report of the third quarter of the announcement blew everything. The financial staff found 15 million of dollars in bad debts, and the company's profit margin is far from expected. For the rest of the time, the symptoms of big corporate sickness followed, with shareholders ' accusations, stocks plummeted, corporate prospects dim, and even bankruptcy. Ellison, who once relied on loans to maintain their luxurious lives and not sell their shares, could hardly hold on. The company's efforts to overhaul the financial (Financial director Jeff Walker to some extent rescued the company). The company announced cuts in spending, a large number of sales staff, and the hiring of specialized management personnel.

The nightmare continued until the release of Oracle's seventh edition. The company has been talking for years about a new version (once derided as a Ellison) until June 1992, when the company learned the sixth Edition's hasty listing and listened to a wide range of user suggestions, and focused on the new version of the extensive and meticulous testing. This release adds a number of new performance features: Distributed transaction processing, enhanced management, new tools for application development, and security methods. ORACLE7 also includes new features, such as stored procedures, triggering procedures, and descriptive referential integrity, and makes the database truly programmable. It is also necessary to note that this version introduces a new optimizer outside the original rule-based optimizer (RBO): cost-based optimizer (cost-based Optimizer, CBO). The CBO calculates the execution cost of the statement according to the statistics of the database itself, and obtains the concrete statement execution plan. In the next few major releases, Oracle's engineers gradually improved the optimizer, and the CBO gradually replaced Rbo.

Oracle Seventh Edition is a truly outstanding product of Oracle and has been a great success. It was a good time to have this release, when Sybase's database had taken up a lot of its share, and Oracle, with this version of success, repelled the aggressive Sybase. The company's sales staff this time to the user to cash short promises. After more than two or three years of governance, the company finally got rid of all sorts of troubles and started healthy development again, with sales from 1.5 billion US dollars in 92 to 4.2 billion dollars four years later.

Top

"Mixing Muddy Water" is a stunt of Ellison. At the European Information Technology Forum meeting in Paris in 1995, Ellison introduced the concept of a network computer (network COMPUTER,NC) in an impromptu speech, which refers to a low-cost computer with simple configuration but full access to network resources, most importantly, it does not require an operating system , or, more accurately, Microsoft's operating system is not needed. Ellison hopes to use this to resist Microsoft's strength. Soon, Oracle joined IBM, Sun, Apple and Netscape to set standards for networked computers in 1996, but in fact people did not see a single real NC production from the beginning. The speech has sparked a firestorm in the industry, and Oracle has attracted enough attention and seen Oracle's great faith in the web.

June 1997, Oracle Eighth edition released. ORACLE8 support for object-oriented development and new multimedia applications, this version also provides support for the Internet, Network computing, and so laid the foundation. At the same time, this version began to have a large number of users and massive data processing characteristics. This version is also very commendable.


Oracle 8i was officially released in September 1998. "I" represents the Internet, and this version adds a number of features designed to support the Internet. This release provides a full range of Java support for database users. Oracle 8i is the first database to fully integrate the local Java runtime environment, and can write Oracle stored procedures in Java. Yes, Java, as long as it is able to crack down on Microsoft's weapons, Oracle will be useful. Oracle8i has added SQLJ (an open standard for embedding SQL database statements into client or server Java code) and Oracle intermedia (for managing multimedia content) and XML, among other features. At the same time, ORACLE 8i greatly improves scalability, scalability, and availability to meet network application needs. Over the next few years, Oracle has released several versions of 8i, and has gradually added some new features to network-oriented applications. Oracle is naturally unwilling to be outdone in the face of the burgeoning open source movement, Oracle 8 and Oracle Application Server 4.0, which was released on Linux platforms in October 1998, and shortly thereafter Oracle 8i for Linux. In the. com tide, Oracle is standing on the cusp of the wave-goers.

Oracle 9i was released at Oracle OpenWorld Conference in June 2001. Of the many new features of Oracle 9i, the most important is the real application clusters (RAC). Speaking of Oracle cluster servers, Oracle began to develop Oracle parallel servers (Oracle Parallel Server, OPS) as early as the fifth edition, and gradually perfected their functionality in later releases, but, strictly speaking, Although OPS is a clustered environment, it does not reflect the benefits of cluster technology. After fully absorbing RDB (Oracle acquired the RDB database of Compaq in 1994, prior to the RDB of Dec, Dec was able to achieve the first commercially available VAX cluster database in RDB) after some technical advantages, Oracle has finally launched the real application cluster software. RAC enables multiple clustered computers to share access to a single database for increased scalability, availability, and economics. ORACLE 9i RAC has broken a number of records in the benchmark of tpc-c, a time of industry attention. The new database also contains integrated Business intelligence (BI) capabilities. Oracle 9i 2nd also made a number of significant improvements to make Oracle databases a local XML database, as well as the features of high availability such as automated management, Data guard, and so on.

History is still going on.

At the Oracle World Congress in San Francisco on September 8, 2003, Ellison announced the next generation of database products as Oracle 10g. Oracle Application Server 10g (Oracle Application Server 10g) will also serve as Oracle's next-generation application infrastructure software integration Suite. "G" stands for "grid, grid". The biggest feature of this edition is the ability to add grid computing. What is Grid computing? Grid computing can connect computers that are distributed around the world and integrate computer resources across a high speed internet into fully shared resource integration. Through reasonable scheduling, different computing environments are integrated and shared. Oracle claims that 10g can be used as a basis for grid computing, pointing to the biggest enemy of IBM's "on-demand"! Oracle, it seems, has staked this once on the big market for grid computing. But what about the future? Let's wait and see.

If IBM is a giant whale in the IT industry, Oracle must be a big shark: aggressive and offensive. Just in early June 2003, Oracle suddenly announced 5.1 billion dollars to buy PeopleSoft (PeopleSoft), the industry again shook. Zhiju once again revealed Oracle's always aggressive nature. You know, Oracle in the development process is very little to the acquisition of enterprises, then the purchase of benevolence subjects? First of all, Oracle coveted enterprise application software market for a long time, but suffering from the inability to further expand the market share, especially important, once successful, can directly against the largest enemy of IBM to attack, but also to the big SAP and other giants, this is particularly important. Today, Oracle is still not up to the goal of the situation and Benevolence division, the results, let us wait and see.

"The greatest joy in life is to defeat the enemy," Ellison must love this job.

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The author of this article:
Fenng, a US-funded company DBA, spends his spare time in various database-related technical forums and enjoys it. The current focus is on how to effectively build enterprise applications using Oracle databases. There is a little research on Oracle tuning and troubleshooting.
Personal technology site: http://www.dbanotes.net/. You can contact him via email dbanotes@gmail.com.