Data Post 26: Oracle — The Company That Made the Database Its Empire

IBM built the foundation. Microsoft built the house. Oracle built the vault — and charged everyone to store their most valuable asset in it.

IBM built the foundation. Microsoft put technology on every desk. Oracle did something more focused and, in its own way, more audacious — it built an entire empire on a single idea: that the database was the most important piece of enterprise technology ever created. And for decades, it was almost impossible to argue otherwise.

The Beginning — A Bet on the Database

Oracle was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates in Santa Clara, California. Ellison was 32 years old and had been working as a programmer when he came across a research paper written by Edgar Codd — the same Edgar Codd we discussed in Post 23, the man who invented the relational database model in the 1960s.

Codd’s paper described a theoretical system for storing and retrieving data using tables, rows, and columns — a relational model that was elegant, logical, and powerful. The problem was that nobody had actually built it yet in a commercially viable way. Ellison saw the opportunity and went after it.

The company was originally called Software Development Laboratories, then Relational Software Inc., before becoming Oracle Corporation — named after a project Ellison had worked on for the CIA called Oracle. In 1979 Oracle released the world’s first commercially available relational database management system. It was written in a language called C, which made it portable across different hardware systems — a significant advantage at a time when most software was tied to specific machines.

That decision to build a portable, commercially available relational database was the foundation of everything Oracle became.

SQL — The Language That Powered It All

Central to Oracle’s success was its adoption and development of SQL — Structured Query Language — the same language we introduced in Post 19 when we talked about how application servers query databases.

SQL gave businesses a standardised way to interact with their data. Ask questions, retrieve records, update information, delete entries — all through a consistent and learnable language. Oracle’s implementation of SQL was powerful, feature-rich, and deeply embedded in enterprise workflows.

For anyone working in data today, SQL remains one of the most essential skills you can have. Decades after Oracle helped popularise it, SQL is still the universal language of databases — used across Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and virtually every other relational database system in the world. Learning SQL is still one of the first things anyone entering the data field should do, and we will come back to it in much more depth in future posts.

Oracle in the Enterprise — Dominance and Dependency

Through the 1980s and 1990s Oracle grew rapidly, becoming the database of choice for large enterprises across banking, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, and government. If an organisation needed to store, manage, and retrieve large volumes of critical data reliably and securely — Oracle was almost always the answer.

Part of Oracle’s success was technical — its database was genuinely powerful and capable of handling workloads that other systems struggled with. But part of it was also strategic. Oracle built deep relationships with enterprise customers and created an ecosystem of products, services, and integrations that made switching away from Oracle extraordinarily difficult and expensive. This is what is known in the technology world as vendor lock-in — once an organisation had built its systems around Oracle, leaving was not a simple decision.

This strategy made Oracle extraordinarily profitable, but it also made it one of the most polarising companies in the technology industry. IT professionals who worked with Oracle often had strong opinions about it — admiring its power and reliability while acknowledging the significant cost and complexity that came with it.

By the late 1990s Oracle was one of the most valuable technology companies in the world, and Larry Ellison — famously competitive, flamboyant, and outspoken — had become one of the most recognisable figures in Silicon Valley. His rivalry with Bill Gates became the stuff of technology legend.

Oracle’s Product Empire

Over time Oracle expanded well beyond the database, building and acquiring a vast portfolio of enterprise software products.

Oracle E-Business Suite became one of the most widely deployed enterprise resource planning systems in the world — covering everything from finance and human resources to supply chain and manufacturing. Large organisations ran their entire operations on Oracle software, making it one of the most deeply embedded technology vendors in corporate history.

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 brought Java — one of the most widely used programming languages in the world — under Oracle’s ownership. This was a controversial move that reshaped the Java ecosystem and led to one of the most significant legal battles in technology history between Oracle and Google over the use of Java in Android.

Oracle Exadata combined database software with specialised hardware to deliver extreme performance for data warehousing and analytical workloads — a direct response to the growing demand for faster data processing as the volume of enterprise data exploded.

Oracle and the Cloud — A Late but Serious Move

Like IBM and Microsoft before it, Oracle faced a significant challenge when cloud computing began to reshape the enterprise technology landscape. Oracle’s business model was built on expensive on-premise software and hardware — exactly the model that cloud computing was disrupting.

Oracle was slower than Microsoft to embrace the cloud, and its competitors — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — had established significant leads by the time Oracle launched Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in a serious way. Critics argued that Oracle was too wedded to its existing revenue streams to pivot quickly enough.

But Oracle pushed back hard, investing heavily in its cloud platform and making a series of significant moves to modernise its offering. Its acquisition of Cerner — one of the largest healthcare IT companies in the world — in 2022 for nearly $30 billion signalled Oracle’s ambition to dominate cloud infrastructure in the healthcare sector, one of the largest and most data-intensive industries on the planet.

The cloud battle for Oracle is still being fought — but the company’s financial strength, its deeply embedded enterprise relationships, and its database heritage give it a foundation that is hard to dislodge.

Oracle’s Contribution to the Data World

Oracle’s impact on the data world is difficult to overstate.

It took Edgar Codd’s theoretical relational database model and turned it into a commercial reality that enterprises around the world built their operations on. It helped establish SQL as the universal language of data. It pushed the boundaries of what databases could do in terms of scale, reliability, and performance. And it created a generation of database administrators, data engineers, and SQL developers whose skills were built on Oracle platforms.

Even today, in an era of cloud databases, NoSQL systems, and open source alternatives, Oracle databases continue to run some of the most critical systems in banking, government, healthcare, and telecommunications worldwide. The technology that Larry Ellison and his co-founders built in a Santa Clara office in 1977 — inspired by a research paper from the 1960s — is still quietly powering much of the world’s most important data infrastructure.

Why should we care to know

The IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle mini-series we have covered across Posts 24, 25, and 26 tells an important story. Three companies, three different approaches, three different eras — but all three deeply shaped the data world you are entering today.

IBM gave us mainframes, hard drives, and the concept of large-scale reliable data processing. Microsoft gave us accessible computing, Excel, SQL Server, and the cloud productivity tools that define modern workplaces. Oracle gave us the commercial relational database, SQL as a universal language, and enterprise data infrastructure that has lasted half a century.

Understanding where the tools come from — and why they were built the way they were — makes you a better data professional. Not just someone who knows how to use the technology, but someone who understands the thinking behind it.

From here we go deeper step-by-step into the data world itself — data types, big data, data warehousing, and the architectures that power modern data systems.