Oracle began in 1977 when Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates founded a small consulting firm originally called Software Development Laboratories. The founders had read of Edgar Codd’s relational model and of IBM’s System R research project, and they set out to build a commercial relational database management system using SQL as its query language. The company was later renamed Relational Software, Inc. and then, in 1983, took the name Oracle after its flagship product.
The Computer History Museum’s relational database workshop, which gathered participants from Oracle and IBM, documents how much of the company’s direction was driven by Ellison’s vision and style “from both a marketing and sales and from a technology viewpoint,” tracing Oracle’s history from its founding in 1977 through the 1990s. The same record covers Oracle’s choice of SQL for compatibility with IBM, its strategy of porting the database across many hardware platforms, and the rapid growth and occasional crises of the company and the database industry.
Oracle’s central product is the Oracle Database, which the company’s own documentation describes as a relational database management system built on Codd’s 1970 relational model, storing data in tables of rows and columns and operating on that data through SQL. On the strength of that product Oracle expanded into a broad enterprise software business spanning databases, middleware, business applications, and later cloud services.
Note on dates: this entry uses a year-level date of 1977 for the founding, as documented by the Computer History Museum workshop record, rather than asserting a specific founding day.