Oracle Books
The Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle RDBMS or simply as Oracle) is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS)[2] produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation.
Larry Ellison and his friends and former co-workers Bob Miner and Ed Oates started the consultancy Software Development Laboratories (SDL) 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 previously employed by Ampex.
Version numbering
Oracle products follow a custom release numbering and naming convention. With the Oracle RDBMS 10g release, Oracle Corporation began using the "10g" label in all versions of its major products, although some sources refer to Oracle Applications Release 11i as Oracle 11i.[clarification needed] The suffixes "i" and "g" do not actually represent a low-order part of the version number, as letters typically represent in software industry version numbering; that is, there is no predecessor version of Oracle 10g called Oracle 10f. Instead, the letters stand for "internet" and "grid", respectively.[citation needed] Consequently many simply drop the "g" or "i" suffix when referring to specific versions of an Oracle product.
Major database-related products and some of their versions include:
Oracle Application Server 10g (also known as "Oracle AS 10g"): a middleware product;
Oracle Applications Release 11i (aka Oracle e-Business Suite, Oracle Financials or Oracle 11i): a suite of business applications;
Oracle Developer Suite 10g (9.0.4);
Oracle JDeveloper 10g: a Java integrated development environment;
Since version 5, Oracle's RDBMS release numbering has used the following codes:
Oracle v5
Oracle v6
Oracle7: 7.0.16—7.3.4
Oracle8 Database: 8.0.3—8.0.6
Oracle8i Database Release 1: 8.1.5.0—8.1.5.1
Oracle8i Database Release 2: 8.1.6.0—8.1.6.3
Oracle8i Database Release 3: 8.1.7.0—8.1.7.4
Oracle9i Database Release 1: 9.0.1.0—9.0.1.5 (patchset as of December 2003)
Oracle9i Database Release 2: 9.2.0.1—9.2.0.8 (patchset as of April 2007)
Oracle Database 10g Release 1: 10.1.0.2—10.1.0.5 (patchset as of February 2006)
Oracle Database 10g Release 2: 10.2.0.1—10.2.0.5 (patchset as of April 2010)
Oracle Database 11g Release 1: 11.1.0.6—11.1.0.7 (patchset as of September 2008)
Oracle Database 11g Release 2: 11.2.0.1—11.2.0.2 (patchset as of November 2010)
The version-numbering syntax within each release follows the pattern: major.maintenance.application-server.component-specific.platform-specific.
For example, "10.2.0.1 for 64-bit Solaris" means: 10th major version of Oracle, maintenance level 2, Oracle Application Server (OracleAS) 0, level 1 for Solaris 64-bit.
The Oracle Administrator's Guide offers further information on Oracle release numbers.
