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A Short Oracle Tutorial For Beginners

Introduction
This is just a quick introduction to Oracle for beginners, to give a short history of
databases and Oracle Corporation's role in them, explain relational theory and provide a
few examples so you can see how relational databases work. 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, but if you would like to learn more
just e-mail tutorial@smart-soft.co.uk and receive our free tutorial.

History of Databases - From Trees To Objects

The storage and management of data is probably the biggest headache of all businesses. It
has been so for a long while and is likely to continue for a long while too. As companies
try to find out and store more and more details about their customers and their buying
habits, they need to store and manage more and more data. The only way this can be done
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 - not relational or object-oriented- and were
very complex and inflexible which made life difficult when it came to adding new
applications or reorganising the data. The solution to this was relational databases which
are based on the concept of normalisation - the separation of the logical and physical
representation of data.

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).

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.

In the mean time, IBM's research into relational databases had 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 vendor. 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.