Founded in August 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, Ed Oates and Bruce Scott, Oracle was initially named after "Project Oracle" a project for one of their clients, the C.I.A, and the company that developed Oracle was dubbed "Systems Development Labs", or SDL. Although they may not have realized it at the time, these four men would change the history of database management forever.
In 1978 SDL was renamed Relational Software Inc (RSI) to market their new database.
Oracle products follow a custom release-numbering and -naming convention. The "c" in the current release, Oracle Database 19c, stands for "Cloud". Previous releases (e.g. Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Database) have used suffixes of "g" and "i" which stand for "Grid" and "Internet" respectively. Prior to the release of Oracle8i Database, no suffixes featured in Oracle Database naming conventions. Note that there was no v1 of Oracle Database, as co-founder Larry Ellison "knew no one would want to buy version 1".Oracle's RDBMS release numbering has used the following codes:
Following are the four editions of the Oracle database.