History of Oracle

Oracle Database, the relational database management system from Oracle Corporation, is arguably the most powerfull and feature rich database on the market.
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. There was no version 1, instead the first version was called version 2 as a marketing strategy.
In 1983, RSI was renamed Oracle Corporation to more closely align itself with its flagship product. Oracle version 3 was released which had been re-written in the C Programming Language and supported commit and rollback transaction functionalities. Platform support was extended to UNIX with this version, which until then had run on Digital VAX/VMS systems.
In 1984, Oracle version 4 was released which supported read consistency.
Starting 1985, Oracle began supporting the Client-Server model, with networks becoming available in the mid 80s. Oracle version 5.0 supported distributed querying.
In 1988, Oracle entered the products market and developed its ERP product - Oracle Financials based on the Oracle Relational Database. Oracle version 6 was released with support for PL/SQL, row-level locking and hot backups.
In 1992, Oracle version 7 was released with support for integrity constraints, stored procedures and triggers.
In 1997, Oracle version 8 was released with support for object-oriented development and multimedia applications.
In 1999, Oracle 8i was released which is more in tune with the needs of the Internet (The i in the name stands for "Internet"). The database has a native Java Virtual Machine.
In 2001, Oracle 9i was released with 400 new features including the facilty to read and write XML documents. 9i also provided an option for Oracle RAC, or Real Application Clusters, a computer cluster database, as replacement for the Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) option.
In 2003, Oracle 10g was released. The g stands for "Grid"; one of the sales points of 10g is that it's "grid computing ready".