8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17? - Of course!

I am likely to be proved wrong. Last year I blogged that the next major version of Oracle might be version 13. It is not an unreasonable assumption. I started using Oracle with 8i, then 9i, 10g, 11g, and now 12c. There is a pattern here isn’t there? The number 13 is next isn’t it?

Of course the next major version number won’t be 13. What was I thinking and how dare I think logically!

Why? Enter the Marketing Department – “What, you want to next version of Oracle to be 13, the unlucky number!“

A conversation on oracle-l today noted that the version number for SQL Developer and SQLcl (not the RDBMS, so there is a little wriggle room left for me yet) jumped to version 17. At a guess, the 17 from 2017 (two digit years, again; what can possibly go wrong – no problems ever before). Aah, so version 17 and not any other number makes a bit more sense now. Sort of.

No Oracle 13 now? It’s obvious now that 13 as an unlucky number has been pointed out isn’t it? Well no – here is Oracle 13, but it’s not the database 🙁 This is getting quite confusing. It is like Java JDK/JRE version numbering nightmare all over again.

Java 1.0.x, 1.1.x referred to as Java 1.0 and 1.1
Java 1.2.x, 1.3.x, 1.4.x all referred to as Java 2
Java 1.5.0 referred to as Java 2 version 5.0
and recent Java versions have their own Wikipedia page

My recollection of Java versions above may even be wrong. Who cares?  I don’t. All I know is that it a mess.

The next number in the series 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 should be 13. My 10 year old knows this too. If 13 isn’t the next number in the series, I will fail the maths tests, the psychometric tests, and the Mensa test too. And so will you!

— Published by Mike, 21:16 14 July 2017 (CET)

ps, my crystal ball was correct. The new version numbering includes a build number. I suggested this for Oracle in my prior post. At least I wasn’t 100% wrong.