The software company founded in 1977 as Software Development Laboratories and later renamed Oracle is Oracle Corporation.
Software Development Laboratories was established in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. The founders worked on a relational database system inspired by an IBM research paper about relational data models. In 1979, the company released Oracle V2, described as the first commercially available SQL-based relational database management system.
The company changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. in 1979 and adopted the name Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982. It later became Oracle Corporation. Oracle’s database software became central to enterprise computing, and the company expanded into applications, cloud infrastructure, servers, and business software.
Oracle is not the same thing as the Oracle Database, although the company develops and sells that product. The corporation’s 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems also brought Java and the SPARC hardware business under Oracle’s ownership. Oracle is headquartered in Austin, Texas.