Oracle Database is the relational database management system built by Oracle, the company founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. The first version sold to customers was numbered Oracle V2, shipped in 1979; the founders chose the number 2 in part because they believed a “version 1” would be hard to sell. It was one of the first commercially available database systems to implement SQL, the query language that grew out of IBM’s relational database research.
Oracle’s own product documentation describes Oracle Database as a relational database management system, or RDBMS, founded on Edgar Codd’s 1970 relational model and on the mathematics of set theory. Data is stored in relations, that is, tables made up of rows and columns, and all operations on that data are expressed in SQL, the standard language for relational databases. The documentation also notes that Oracle later extended the relational model with object-relational features such as user-defined types and inheritance.
The Computer History Museum’s relational database workshop traces the technical evolution of Oracle Database across its successive versions, its early choice of SQL for compatibility with IBM, and its strategy of porting the system to a wide range of hardware platforms. Over the following decades Oracle Database became one of the most widely deployed enterprise databases in the world, the foundation of Oracle’s broader software business.
Note on dates: this entry uses a year-level date of 1979 for the first shipping version, consistent with Oracle’s own historical accounts, rather than asserting a specific release day.