This is just a brief Oracle tutorial for beginners, to provide a short history of databases and Oracle's role in them, explain relational theory and give you an idea on how relational databases work with a few examples. There is also a very brief discussion of object-oriented design as it applies to databases.
Time and space don't permit an in-depth discussion of all the features available in Oracle, but if you would like to learn more just contact us and ask for our free Oracle tutorial mini-course.
The storage and management of data is probably the biggest headache for all businesses. It has been so for a long while and is likely to continue for a long while too. As companies try to store more and more details about their customers and their buying habits and as regulatory requirements for storing more data for longer, so companies will need to store and manage more and more data. The only way this can be done at a reasonable cost is by the use of computers.
In the late 1960s/early 1970s, specialised data management software appeared - the first database management systems (DBMS). These early DBMS were either hierarchical (tree) or network (CODASYL) databases. These early systems were very complex and inflexible and so it adding new applications or reorganising the data was very difficult and time-consuming.
In 1970 the relational data model was defined by E.F. Codd (see "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" Comm. ACM. 13 (June 6, 1970), 377-387). This delivered a solution to the problems of tree and network databases due to the concept of normalisation which involves the separation of the logical and physical representation of data.
In 1974 IBM started a project called System/R to prove the theory of relational databases. This led to the development of a query language called SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language) later renamed to Structured Query Language (SQL) for legal reasons and now the query language of all databases.
In 1978 a prototype System/R implementation was evaluated at a number of IBM customer sites. By 1979 the project finished with the conclusion that relational databases were a feasible commercial product.
IBM's research into relational databases had also come to the attention of a group of engineers in California who were so convinced of the potential that they formed a company called Relational Software, Inc. in 1977 to build such a database. Their product was called Oracle and the first version for VAX/VMS was released in 1979, thereby becoming the first commercial rdbms, beating IBM to market by 2 years.
In the 1980s the company was renamed to Oracle Corporation. Throughout the 1980s, new features were added and performance improved as the price of hardware came down and Oracle became the largest independent rdbms vendors. By 1985 they boasted of having more than 1000 installations.
As relational databases became accepted, companies wanted to expand their use to store images, spreadsheets, etc. which can't be described in 2-dimensional terms. This led to the Oracle database becoming an object-relational hybrid in version 8.0, i.e. a relational database with object extensions, enabling you to have the best of both worlds.
This Oracle tutorial continues in part 2 with an explanation of relational databses including a few examples.
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