Oracle DB versioning

Oracle as database is quite popular within SAP customers. It is fact for many years. The reason why customers are running their SAP system on Oracle database is that Oracle is quite stable, scalable and SAP is really optimized for Oracle. Although both companies do not like each other very much when it comes to database SAP is really taking a lot of effort to optimize their software for Oracle. Not sure how long this will be true as SAP will certainly shift its focus on their own homegrown HANA database but for time being it is valid.

Speaking of BW there are many features that are optimized for BW running on Oracle DB. You can find a lot of SAP Notes discussing those features. There are many RSADMIN parameters just for Oracle as DB. Once you want to use some of these features you may need to check first fi you have valid version of Oracle DB for which feature is valid. This here comes the tricky part. Oracle DB versioning is different from its DB’s marketing names. You can see in the particular note (e.g. 1287382) that you need Oracle DB 11g. What you see in your SAP system under menu System-> Status is that you have 11.2.0.3.0. So is 11.2.0.3.0 really 11g? Well version number starts with 11 but what about g?

Unfortunately I haven’t found any official material on how to match between real version number and its marketing name. But speaking very high level we can match those two as follows:

name	number
Oracle v2	2.3
Oracle v3	3.1.3
Oracle v4	4.1.4.0-4.1.4.4
Oracle v5	5.0.22, 5.1.17, 5.1.22
Oracle v6	6.0.17-6.0.36
Oracle7	7.0.12–7.3.4
Oracle8	8.0.3–8.0.6
Oracle8i rel 1	8.1.5.0–8.1.5.1
Oracle8i rel 2	8.1.6.0–8.1.6.3
Oracle8i rel 3	8.1.7.0–8.1.7.4
Oracle9i rel 1	9.0.1.0–9.0.1.5
Oracle9i rel 2	9.2.0.1–9.2.0.8
Oracle Database 10g Rel 1	10.1.0.2–10.1.0.5
Oracle Database 10g Rel 2	10.2.0.1–10.2.0.5
Oracle Database 11g Rel 1	11.1.0.6–11.1.0.7
Oracle Database 11g Rel 2	11.2.0.1–11.2.0.4
Oracle Database 12c Rel 1	12.1.*

Source of information: Wikipedia page.