Oracle, founded in 1977, developed the Oracle Database and is named after its flagship product.
Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates founded the company in 1977 as Software Development Laboratories. The business changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. in 1979 and then adopted the name Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982, reflecting the importance of its database product.
Oracle’s database software was influenced by relational database research at IBM, including the work described by Edgar F. Codd. Relational databases organize information into tables and use structured query languages to retrieve and manage it, a model that became fundamental to business computing.
The company later expanded into enterprise applications, hardware, and cloud infrastructure. Its 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems brought Java and the technology behind the Solaris operating system into Oracle. Oracle’s name is therefore not a reference to a search engine; it comes from the company’s early database product and project.