Oracle is the world’s most popular database in enterprise market. It’s designed for true distributed computing and handles the most complex and demanding needs.
We support Oracle directly in our products! You don't need separate drivers and can immediately connect to your database (with or even without OCI).
Original Oracle database was created by Software Development Laboratories consultancy in 1977. Bob Miner was the lead engineer in the early days, programming the majority of Oracle version 3 by himself. Oracle was the first database to take advantage of relational algebra and theory of relational databases described by IBM’s Edgar F. Codd. As IBM was slow to realize Codd idea’s potential, small SDL was able to come to market with its relational SQL database product before IBM. SDL changed name to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982, then in 1995 it became Oracle Corporation.
Oracle introduced a lot of firsts in the database world. In 1985 Oracle 5 worked in now-standard client/server mode. In 1988 PL/SQL was introduced, Oracle’s extension to standard SQL query language. Starting with Oracle 8i, Oracle supports web-scale and Internet technology. Today Oracle provides large database clusters, in-memory databases, data warehousing, business intelligence, distributed key/value NoSQL database and cloud services. Oracle acquired Sun Corporation and with it MySQL database, much to the chagrin of MySQL author who in turn left MySQL AB corporation and spun off MariaDB project, compatible with MySQL, but fully open-source.
Main Oracle competitor is Microsoft SQL Server.