Oracle was named after a spy job.
Larry Ellison built a database for the CIA in the 1970s, codenamed Oracle. But the relational idea was IBM’s. Edgar Codd had laid it out in a 1970 paper IBM sat on to protect its older software. Ellison shipped what IBM wouldn’t — the first SQL database you could buy. By mid-September 2026 Oracle had made him the seventh-richest person alive.
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