What is Oracle?

Oracle (in ancient Greece, someone in touch with the deities; from Latin, oraculum or divine announcement) says it is the world's leading supplier of software for information management but it is best known for its sophisticated relational database products (notably Oracle9i), which are used in Fortune 1000 corporations and by many of the largest Web sites. Oracle's relational database was the world's first to support the Structured Query Language (SQL), now an industry standard. When CEO Lawrence J. Ellison and a few associates formed Oracle in 1977, they were out to prove wrong the prevailing theory that relational databases could not be commercially viable. Today, as proof of their success, they've parlayed an initial $2,000 investment in the company into an annual revenue exceeding $9.7 billion.
Oracle targets high-end workstations and minicomputers as the server platforms on which to run its database systems. Along with Sun Microsystems, Oracle has long been a champion of network computers. It now boasts that it was the world's first software company to develop and deploy 100 percent Internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, server, enterprise business applications, and application development and decision support tools. In fact, Oracle CEO Ellison has said, "If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden."
Based in Redwood Shores, California, it has more than 43,000 employees worldwide and does business in over 150 countries. Oracle (ORCL) is publicly traded on the Nasdaq.

What is a Relational Database?
Databases have been a staple of business computing from the very beginning of the digital era. In fact, the relational database was born in 1970 when E.F. Codd, a researcher at IBM, wrote a paper outlining the process. Since then, relational databases have grown in popularity to become the standard.
Originally, databases were flat. This means that the information was stored in one long text file, called a tab delimited file. Each entry in the tab delimited file is separated by a special character, such as a vertical bar (). Each entry contains multiple pieces of information (fields) about a particular object or person grouped together as a record. The text file makes it difficult to search for specific information or to create reports that include only certain fields from each record.
You can see that you have to search sequentially through the entire file to gather related information, such as age or salary. A relational database allows you to easily find specific information. It also allows you to sort based on any field and generate reports that contain only certain fields from each record. Relational databases use tables to store information. The standard fields and records are represented as columns (fields) and rows (records) in a table. More Details..

Oracle - The History

An Oracle database consists of a collection of data managed by an Oracle database management system. Popular generic usage also uses the term to refer to the Oracle DBMS management software, but not necessarily to a specific database under its control.
One can refer to the Oracle database management system unambiguously as Oracle DBMS or (since it manages databases which have relational characteristics) as Oracle RDBMS.
Oracle Corporation itself blurs the very useful distinction between:
1. data managed by an Oracle RDBMS
2. an Oracle database, and
3. the Oracle RDBMS software itself
when it refers nowadays to the Oracle RDBMS (the software it sells for the purpose of managing databases) as the Oracle Database. The distinction between the managed data (the database) and the software which manages the data (the DBMS / RDBMS) relies, in Oracle's marketing literature, on the capitalisation of the word database.
Oracle Corporation produces and markets the Oracle DBMS, which many database applications use extensively on many popular computing platforms.
Larry Ellison and his friends and former co-workers Bob Miner and Ed Oates - who had started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) - developed the original Oracle DBMS software. They called their finished product Oracle after the code name of a CIA-funded project they had worked on while previously employed by Ampex.

Corporate and Tecnical Development:

Larry Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories in 1977. In 1979 SDL changed its company-name to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI) and introduced its product Oracle V2 as an early commercially-available relational database system. The version did not support transactions, but implemented the basic SQL functionality of queries and joins. (RSI never released a version 1 - instead calling the first version version 2 as a marketing gimmick.)
In 1983, RSI in its turn changed its name, becoming known as Oracle Corporation to align itself more closely with its flagship product. The company released Oracle version 3, which it had re-written using the C programming language and which supported COMMIT and ROLLBACK functionality for transactions. Version 3 extended platform support from the existing Digital VAX/VMS systems to include Unix environments.
In 1984 Oracle Corporation released Oracle version 4, which supported read-consistency.
From 1985 the Oracle DBMS began supporting the client-server model, with networks becoming available in the mid-1980s. Oracle version 5.0 supported distributed queries.
In 1989 Oracle Corporation entered the application products market and developed its ERP product - Oracle Financials based on the Oracle relational database. Oracle RDBMS version 6 came out with support for PL/SQL, row-level locking and hot backups.
In 1992 Oracle version 7h (the h stands for "datawareHouse") appeared with support for referential integrity, stored procedures and triggers.
In 1997 Oracle Corporation released version 8, which supported object-oriented development and multimedia applications.
In 1999 Oracle8i came out, aiming to operate more in tune with the needs of the Internet (The i in the name stands for "Internet"). The Oracle 8i database incorporated a native Java virtual machine (JVM).
In 2001 Oracle9i appeared with 400 new features, including the ability to read and write XML documents. 9i also provided an option for Oracle RAC, or Real Application Clusters, a computer cluster database, as a replacement for the Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) option.
In 2003, Oracle Corporation released Oracle Database 10g. The g stands for "grid"; emphasizing a marketing thrust of presenting 10g as "grid-computing ready".
In 2005 Oracle Database 10.2.0.1 — also known as Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10gR2) — appeared. More Details..