The Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle RDBMS or simply as Oracle) is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation.  Larry Ellison and his friends, former co-workers Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started the consultancy Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977.  SDL developed the original version of the Oracle software. The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a CIA-funded project Ellison had worked on while previously employed by Ampex.

Oracle has many advantages and features that makes it popular and thereby makes it as the world’s largest enterprise software company. Oracle comes with new versions with new features implemented in new version while the features of earlier versions still being maintained. One important aspect is Oracle databases tend to be backwards compatible. Also when Oracle releases a new version, their documentation contains a list of all the features new to that version thus makes it user friendly for one to learn the new features. Oracle is used for almost all large application and one of the main applications in which oracle takes its major presence is banking. In fact ten of the world’s top 10 banks run Oracle applications this is because oracle offers a powerful combination of technology and comprehensive, pre-integrated business applications, including key functionality built specifically for banks.

Some similar databases like Sybase, SQL-Server one have facilities for using loops, conditions, arrays and so on in a program and also facilities like cursors and temp tables but all this would be used in a convoluted fashion which are very slow and resource consuming operations. The operations are not implemented as in Oracle, which is efficient enough. Also with the features available in oracle with the earlier versions in market the oracle company keeps upgrading and releasing new products into market, new versions releases which serves better than the earlier versions and thus the performance is improved much in later versions and thereby retaining the market growth and thus proves greater satisfaction to the customers using this technology. Thus the advantage of a higher version is that one would have more features and better capabilities. For instance oracle 8i version has many new features which helped users namely like with oracle 8i one could run Java in the database, had features like new features on partitioning to support large database and so on. With the next version 9i oracle had these facilities maintained and had more new facilities added to it namely like new features added to help the DBA to handle change database configuration and so on.

Oracle is a database that responds very well with excellent performance in demanding environments. Oracle is a major database, which along with its added features passes the ACID test, which is important in insuring the integrity of data. This is very important because data is the heart of any system in organization. A reliable and adequate database system has the following properties:

Atomicity:

That is Results of a transaction’s execution are either all committed or all rolled back.

Consistency:

The database is transformed from one valid state to another valid state. Illegal transactions aren’t allowed and, if an integrity constraint can’t be satisfied then the transaction is rolled back.

Isolation:

The results of a transaction are invisible to other transactions until the transaction is complete thus increasing the security on data.

Durability:

Once committed (completed), the results of a transaction are permanent and survive future system and media failures and thus ensuring maintenance and protection of data.

Benefits:

• Protects from server failure, site failure, human error, and reduces planned downtime
• Secures data and enables compliance with unique row-level security, fine-grained auditing, transparent data encryption, and total recall of data
• High-performance data warehousing, online analytic processing, and data mining
• Easily manages entire lifecycle of information for the largest of databases

Thus oracle has many advantages and features that give security, protection, maintenance, reliability and performance on operation of data and with this in addition its main popularity and stability is because it keeps on adding new features which makes it user friendly for users and popularly used database among organizations.