Oracle, a major enterprise-software company by market capitalization, was originally named after Project Oracle, a database project developed for the CIA.
In 1977, Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates founded Software Development Laboratories. The company worked on a project for the Central Intelligence Agency whose code name was Oracle. Drawing on research about relational databases, the founders developed software intended to store and retrieve information flexibly.
The company changed its name to Relational Software Inc. in 1979 and later adopted the name Oracle Corporation in 1982. Its database products became central to enterprise information systems, where organizations store, query, and manage large collections of structured data.
Project Oracle is sometimes confused with the company's later product names, such as Oracle Database. The project was the early development effort and code name; Oracle became the corporate and product brand that followed.