Introduction to Oracle
In this article, I am going to give you a brief introduction to Oracle. Please read our previous article where we discussed Client-Server (Database Server) Technology.
Oracle Corporation Products:
Oracle is one of the largest software company in the world. Most of us use oracle products every day whether knowingly or unknowingly. It is most commonly known as the company providing database solutions through its customized software and other DBMS product solutions but the scope of Oracle is not limited to that field only. Oracle is one of the most influential companies on the planet, it was the 3rd largest software company in terms of revenue in the year 2018, coming just after Microsoft and Alphabet-the parent company of Google.
Oracle was started in 1977 but the Larry Ellison, the famous entrepreneur along with Edward Oates and Robert Nimrod –at that time the name of the company was software development laboratories after further changes in the name the company finally changes its name to oracle corporation in 1995. The initial inspiration for the company came when Larry Ellison, the inspiration from a paper written by Edgar F Codd in 1970 on relational database management systems. The paper was entitled a relational model of data for large shared databases. Allison also heard about the IBM system is the database from an article in the IBM research general provided by olds at that time Allison wanted to make a system from the oracle that would be compatible with the IBM system R but he was not successful in that attempt because IBM kept the error codes of their DBMS as a secret. On 12th March 1986, the company had its initial public offering was a hugely successful IPO but it was overshadowed by the IPO of the Microsoft Corporation on the next day, one of the key factors in oracle’s got success was the use of C language in the implementation of the Oracle product. Most of the operating system support C, this helped the company as the core team of the products of the company was easy between different operating system at the time of a starting of oracle many experts believe that the RDBMS was not that useful and the system was to week that seriously considered. However, as it is common in the tech world the experts proved wrong by Larry Ellison and his company.
Oracle’s RDBMS-based system soon dominated the market and oracle was set a long ride to success that continues to this day. After the initial release of the first commercial SQL DBMS, the oracle has never looked back and has diversified into a much wider range of products and services.
At first, we will take a look at the different kinds of the product and the services it offers. These include the design manufacturing and sales of both software and hardware products. It offers complement services alongside its products such as financing consulting costing and training services.
The most famous of all oracle products are the oracle database with the most important being the oracle database its range of database also includes the Berkeley Devi, oracle rdb times 10, oracle Essbase, MySQL and the oracle no sequel database and its other types of software products include the middle wave which is the software that runs between the applications and the operating system on the computer.
it also offers oracle secure enterprise search and the oracle behave which is a type of collaborative software providing teamwork places besides these oracle has a number of other applications for social engagement and monitoring system enterprise management software for development purposes and so on, it’s NetBeans is well known are well known as a Java-based development platform its product also includes a file management system is known as ZFS it combines file system and logical volume management functionality and this might be an unknown fact for many but oracle also develops and supports two operating systems are known as the Oracle Solaris and the oracle Linux, java one of the most popular computer programming is supported and developed by oracle it was initially developed by James Gosling at the Sun Microsystems which was later on acquired by oracle.
Besides all these software products oracle has one range of hardware products as well, for example, the oracle T-series server and M-series mainframe computers which were developed and released after the acquisition of Sun Microsystems the pre engineer are preassembled hardware-software bundles for enterprise use are well known in the industry these include Exadata database machine the x illogical cloud the exa Latics in-memory machine oracle database appliance and big data plants on the service side of the things oracle offers most importantly the oracle cloud services which focused on basically 3 types of services which are known as software as a service platform as a service and infrastructure as a service it has to develop and maintains a wide variety of applications for its cloud infrastructure to provide these kinds of services, it also offers services like oracle consulting which provides technical and business advisory services. Oracle financing oracle support which includes product updates and configuration management and oracle certification program the next suet social program is a program of oracle that assists the non-profit’s with moving their operations to the oracle cloud it expanded to include product donation and online community building on October 2018.
Since it’s starting oracle has expanded to include many products through development by itself or by acquiring the other companies and then further developing the products they acquired the most notable was that of the Sun Microsystems valued at 7 billion US Dollars at the time which were completed on 27 January 2010 the acquisition of the Sun Microsystems transformed oracle from a sole software company to a company that provides both the hardware and the software it has faced many competitors on its journey and has dealt with many lawsuits the most recent one being that one with the Google but it has always come out of the difficulties and has continued on its path as mentioned earlier it was a third largest software maker in the year 2018 one of the key factors to success is leadership Larry Ellison the co-founder of oracle and who is now the executive chairman and the CTO of oracle has been providing great leadership to the company since its humble beginnings with the RDBMS that no one believed in yet the company defied the expert opinions and achieved the status that it now enjoys Larry Ellison is a tech hero not just for oracle and the silicon valley but he is known as a great entrepreneur throughout the world oracle enjoys a wide range of influence on our society and is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet.
In 1977 Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, Ed Oates started the consultancy Software Development Lab that is called Relational Software Inc. (RSI). Later after few years, it was renamed “Oracle Corporation”. In 1977 as they started, they release different version and the first version of the oracle did not come with the 1.0 then it came with the 2.0 that is the 1st version of the oracle database came in June 1979 after 2 years of establishment of the RSI, after that 3.0 came into the market in march 1983, then 4.0 in Oct 1985 and so on are given in below chart.
After coming of 8.0 the terminology and nomenclature were changed, they put the name oracle 8. Then they again fill something missing and then they release something called oracle 8i R1 in 1999from there oracle made lot of popularity after that oracle 8i again came with the various version R2, R3 then again with oracle 9i R1, R2. Then finally came something called oracle 10g in 2004 here, g stands for great computing again they have various flavors 10g R1, 10g R2, and then very popular Oracle 11g R1 in 2007 people are still using this version R1 and R2. Finally, in 2013 they came with cloud oracle 12c R1 where c stands for cloud, 2013 there is a lot of changes in oracle 11g and they made it with a cloud, and then in 2016 oracle 12c R2 which are compatible with cloud and in 2017, they are compatible with on-prem. After 1 year in 2018 they came off with oracle 18c and just 2 years back in Feb 2019 they came off with oracle 19c that is the latest version available in the market. Oracle database actually come with a various version in real life we see inter price edition of oracle database that is the biggest edition, in the organization we are going to work on inter price edition.
SQL (Structured Query Language):
Data is all around us, we use to store data on paper in big filing cabinets but eventually, we store them online in what we call databases. How do we easily pull the data we want to look at it? That’s what SQL is for, it is a language that communicates with databases.
SQL stands for Structured Query Language people call it SQL. In short, SQL is the name for a language that is used to communicate with databases, if we want to pull, edit, add information to a database we can use the language of SQL to do that but how do SQL works? Think of a database like a warehouse data tables like filing cabinets and data like files, this warehouse or database stores data. The warehouse database was built using coding languages like C++ or C or Java, now, imagine regular Lego people need to access the files how do they do that? The first option we could have a storefront built to the warehouse so that customers can ask for files, add files, delete files, but eventually, this means we are building something that takes a lot of time and money. In the real world, this is the equivalent of building a whole app just to access the files in the database as to all comes in, which is the second option, SQL this is like we are hiring a specialized delivery translator her name is Sally Sequel she knows how to talk to the database and she knows how to speak in the language of SQL. So, if we learn to speak SQL then we can ask her to get files for us, now how do we speak Sally’s SQL Language? Here, are the requests we can make if we are a Lego Mayor and we want to know the name of our citizens we’ll ask Sally SQL select name from lego_people, the request we select name, that column from lego_people, which is the name of the table or if we’re a Lego doctor and want to know the name of citizens that are higher than three centimeter we would ask Sally Sequel, she returned two Loge people Sarah and Craig because their centimeter is greater than three and she pulled from the name column within the table called lego_height or if we’re a statistician and we want to know both the height and age combination of citizens but this data is stored in two separate tables, here is what you’d say to Sally Sequel, not all tables are found together. Sally join the Two tables because what both two tables had in common, the names column, she was able to join the two matchings by the names in each table but we can also do other things we can add data if we want to add ‘Joe’, whose age is 12 or we can update data make Joe’s age is 13 we can also delete Joe altogether from creating tables to joining tables to altering tables Sally SQL could do it all.
So, there are three things we need to remember about SQL:
- SQL is a language that we should learn Regardless of the domain, knowing how to get data means we can use more data in our job.
- The way SQL Commands are written Varies Slightly. So, it is the equivalent of having a different Sally SQL Barbie with different accents.
- SQL is a language that speaks only to Relational Databases, which is essentially a database that has a tabular schema. So, it’s a lot like a data table with rows and columns.
SQL*Plus is a command-line tool that provides access to the Oracle RDBMS. SQL*Plus enables you to: Enter SQL*Plus commands to configure the SQL*Plus environment. Understanding SQL Command Syntax, dividing a SQL Command into Separate Lines, we can divide our SQL command into separate lines at any points we wish, as long as individual words are not split, we can create function, PL SQL blocks, etc. we can run.
It is used by Oracle Database Systems to provide a command-line utility that allows writing SQL and PL/SQL commands. In the next article, I am going to discuss Oracle Database Architecture. Here, in this article, I try to give a brief introduction to Oracle. I hope you enjoy this introduction to the Oracle article.