Larry Ellison (love him or hate him) continues to impact the RDBMS market (-your-choice-itively). Here is an article that tells the inextricable story of Oracle and Larry Ellison. Some excerpts:
Whether it is attempting to buy a Mig jet fighter, building a $40- million house modeled on a medieval Japanese village or turning the industry on its head with his latest idea, Ellison is the antithesis of the gray-suited execs or antiseptic yuppies that seem to proliferate in Silicon Valley. What better man to start the database industry? Or the relational database industry, to be exact.
There always have been databases, of course. But they were unwieldy, hierarchical, flat-file-based creatures that depended on a team of programmers to extract meaningful information.
Ted Codd, an IBM Corp. researcher, had published a seminal paper in 1970 describing a "relational database" whereby data was separated out from applications and arranged in tables and columns and could be queried and joined though a variety of dimensions (the 12 rules of Codd). The new database described would, for example, allow queries into sales of a product by region sorted by month, without having to write a separate program.
Codd's paper, heavy on algebraic formulas, did not exactly set the industry on fire. It was six years before IBM and a team at Berkeley decided to start building a relational database.
It may have been six years before a product was available if not for Ellison and a company he started called Relational Software Inc. (RSI).
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