Oracle DBAs and Developers .. ever wondered the meaning of i, g and c in Oracle Database Releases version starting from 8 onwards?
No.. right. Let me explain the meaning of i, g and c.
Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, Ed Oates and Bruce Scott founded Oracle in 1977 with an initial name as Project Oracle. Later renamed Relational Software Inc (RSI), released Oracle Database release 2, 3…8, 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g and 12c which is the latest release.
Oracle is a dominant player in Relation Database Management system competing against IBM, SQL Server and many other open source databases. Each release added some features to the database as per the industry requirements and trends.
This suffix i, g, and c actually denotes major feature introduced in Oracle Database. Internally these versions are further divided into five numeric segments (XX.X.X.X.X) separated by periods.
You can read an article to understand feature added in each release on the dba-oracle website.
i – INTERNET
‘i’ stands for the INTERNET. 8i and 9i are major releases under this suffix. Oracle 8i was the first database to support internet technologies such as Java and HTTP. Oracle 9i release in 2001 added support for XML, Data Compression which increased performance.
g- GRID COMPUTING
“g’ stands for Grid Computing. 10g and 11G were major releases under this suffix. Oracle 10g introduced in 2003, with emphasis on the “g” for grid computing.
This is how Oracle Defines Grid computing in Oracle 11G.
“Grid computing turns computing into a utility, where users don’t care where the data resides, or what computer processes a request. Users request information or computation and have it delivered – as much as they want, whenever they want.
For the DBA, the grid is about resource allocation, information sharing, and high availability. Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters and Oracle Clusterware provide the infrastructure for your database grid. Automatic Storage Management provides the infrastructure for a storage grid. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides you with the holistic management of your grid”.
c – CLOUD
“c” stands for “Cloud”. 12c is latest and major release under this suffix. As per Wikipedia,
“Cloud computing is an information technology (IT) paradigm, a model for enabling ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable resources (such as computer networks, servers, storage, applications, and services), which can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet”.
In addition to many new features, this new version of the Oracle Database implements a multitenant architecture, which enables the creation of pluggable databases (PDBs) in a multitenant container database (CDB).
So I hope you all now know what is the meaning of “i”,”c” and “g” in Oracle Database. Please share your feedback in the comments section and share the article if it helped you.