ABSTRACT
A pretty good name for a database management system (DBMS). But there is another important bit of history behind the use of the word Oracle to name the database engine. Much before Oracle was a company as we know it today, Larry Ellison and Bob Miner, two of the founders of Software Development Labs (which later became Oracle), were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA in the United States). Th e CIA wanted to use a new Structured Query Language (SQL) that IBM had written a white paper about. Th e code name for the project was Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give all answers to all kind of questions intelligence analysts had). Larry Ellison and Bob Miner saw the opportunity to take what they had started as part of this project and market it. So they used that project’s code name of Oracle to name their new database engine and later the company.
