Oracle Corporation





Oracle Corporation, one of the major companies developing database
management systems and tools for database development, dates from 1977 and
has offices in more than 145 countries around the world.

Lawrence J. Ellison (Larry Ellison) has served as Oracle's CEO for several
years. He also as of 2003 functions as chairman of the company. Forbes
magazine once adjudged Ellison the richest man in the world.

Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar Codd on relational
database systems named A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data
Banks. He founded Oracle in 1977 under the name Software Development
Laboratories, later to be renamed Oracle after the flagship product. He had
heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and
wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM stopped this by keeping the
error codes for their DBMS secret.

As of 2003 Oracle Corporation still shipped release 9i as the latest version
of the Oracle database. Oracle 9i application server (9iAS) using J2EE
comprises the server part of that version of the database, making it
possible to deploy web technology applications. The strong interrelationship
between Oracle 9i and Java has enabled the company to allow developers to
set up stored procedures written in the Java language, as well as those
written in the traditional Oracle database programming language, PL/SQL.

Oracle Corporation's tools for developing applications include Oracle
Designer, Oracle Developer, Oracle JDeveloper, and several more. Many
external and third-party tools make the Oracle DBA's tasks easier.

Besides databases, Oracle now also sells applications (and the application
server called 9iAS) that run exclusively through a browser and the internet.
Their slogan is "You can't break it, You can't break in", to signify the
increasing demands on information safety. Oracle Corporation also stresses
the reliability of networked databases and network access to databases as
major selling points.

Headquarters

Oracle Corporation has its world headquarters on the San Francisco Peninsula
in the Redwood Shores area of Redwood City, adjacent to Belmont, near San
Carlos Airport (SQL). In this picture, the Oracle Headquarters appears as
the cluster of six greenish buildings under the rainbow: