Historical Origins

In 1977, Larry Ellison and two of his friends, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, began a company named Software Development Laboratories, and they developed the original Oracle DBMS (Database Management System). They named the product Oracle after a code name project that they had worked on at a company called Ampex. In 1979, Software Development Laboratories was renamed to Relational Software Inc (RSI), and the RSI company was later renamed to Oracle Corporation in 1984.

Major Components of Oracle DBMS

An Oracle consists of a database and an instance.

A database includes all of the physical data files, control files, and redo log files that hold Oracles metadata and your data. Data files hold your actual data and indexes. Redo logs contain records of all changes that have been made. Control files hold important Oracle metadata. Control files contain all the information that instance needs to access a database.

An instance is a combination of the pool of physical memory (RAM) allocated to Oracle and the background processes that Oracle creates to use this memory pool. The RAM is called the SGA (System Global Area). RAM is used to cache data because RAM is about one thousand times faster that disk I/O. Here are the major processes that run in the background:

1. DBWR process that copies data in the RAM to the disk files
2. LGWR records changes applied to data in the redo log for recovery purposes in the event of a problem.
3. PMON Performance Monitor performs cleanup of failed user and server processes.
4. SMON System Monitor performs instance recovery in case server shuts down improperly.
5. CKPT Takes account whenever DBWR writes information from memory to disk.

Versions

The "i" in the version name emphasizes the internet functionality and the "g" emphasizes that the version is "grid-computing" ready.

Editions

Client-Side Utilities

SQL*Plus – for creating and testing command-line SQL Queries and executing PL/SQL procedural programs.
Oracle Developer Suite – for developing database applications including the following developer tools:

1. Forms Builder – for creating custom user applications
2. Reports Builder – for creating reports for displaying, printing, and distributing summary data.
3. Enterprise Manager – for performing database administration tasks such as creating new user accounts and configuring how the DBMS stores and manages data.

Further Study

There is an excellent set of study guide workbooks from Oracle University that you can get by clicking on this link: Oracle University Workbooks

What is Oracle? A Visual Definition is a post from: IdealProgrammer.com

Related posts:

1. What is .NET Framework? A Visual Definition The .NET applications and services operate within the .NET Framework...
2. What is MySQL? A Visual Definition MySQL is an RDBMS (relational database) that is used in...
3. What is Visual Studio .NET? Visually describes Visual Studio 2005 origins, major components, and various...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.