Lawrence Joseph Ellison co-founded the company that became Oracle in 1977, together with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, and led it as chief executive for decades. The three founders set out to build a commercial relational database management system based on Edgar Codd’s relational model and on the SQL ideas emerging from IBM’s research, and they shipped one of the first commercially available SQL relational databases.
The Computer History Museum’s relational database workshop, which brought together participants from Oracle and IBM, records that the company was driven to a large degree by Ellison’s vision and style “from both a marketing and sales and from a technology viewpoint.” The workshop traces Oracle’s arc from its 1977 founding through the 1990s, including its aggressive marketing, its strategy of porting the database to many platforms, and the company’s rapid growth alongside periodic difficulties such as a financial crisis in the early 1990s.
Under Ellison’s leadership Oracle expanded far beyond its original database into middleware, enterprise applications, and cloud computing, becoming one of the largest software companies in the world. He remained a central figure in the company’s strategy and technology direction long after stepping back from the chief executive role.