49 Fun Facts About Oracle Corporation

To which city did Oracle announce in December 2020 that it was moving its headquarters out of Silicon Valley?

Austin, Texas: Oracle said a more flexible policy on where staff work let it change its headquarters, joining a pandemic-era run of technology companies leaving California.

Software Development Laboratories later renamed itself Oracle after what?

Its main product: the firm, by then called Relational Software, took the name of its flagship Oracle database in the early 1980s to tie itself more closely to what it sold.

Oracle takes its name from the codename of a database project for which US government agency?

The CIA paid for a database project codenamed Oracle that Larry Ellison and his co-founders had worked on, and they reused the name for their own product.

Oracle's founders reportedly judged Larry Ellison the weakest programmer among them, so which job did he take?

Salesman: Ellison ran sales and marketing while his co-founders wrote the code, and he built demonstration databases himself to show customers what the product could do.

Whose 1970 paper on relational databases inspired Oracle's founders?

Edgar F. Codd wrote it at IBM, which was slow to act on the idea for fear of hurting sales of its older database, so Oracle's founders got a product built on his model to market first.

Oracle went public in March 1986, one day before which other software company?

Microsoft listed on 13 March 1986, the day after Oracle sold its first shares, and the pair went on to fight for decades over databases and business software.

Oracle moved its world headquarters in 1989 to which California neighbourhood?

Redwood Shores: Oracle outgrew its offices in nearby Belmont, first leased two buildings on the new site, then bought the complex and added four more towers.

In 2013 Oracle moved its listing from Nasdaq to which market?

NYSE landed what was reported as the largest transfer ever between US markets, a coup in its rivalry with Nasdaq, long the natural home of big technology stocks.

In April 2024 Oracle announced a future headquarters move to which city?

Nashville: Larry Ellison dropped the news during an on-stage chat in the city with former senator Bill Frist, saying the campus Oracle was building there would become its world headquarters.

Cerner, which Oracle bought in 2022 for about $28 billion, worked in which field?

Health information technology: Cerner's software stores patient records for hospitals and doctors, and once the $28.3 billion purchase closed Oracle renamed the business Oracle Health.

Larry Ellison makes a brief appearance as himself in which 2010 film?

Iron Man 2 has Tony Stark hail him in passing as the Oracle of Oracle, and Elon Musk turns up in the same film to pitch Stark an electric jet.

Which programming language came to Oracle with its 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems?

Java came with Sun, and the same purchase turned Oracle from a company that sold only software into one selling its own servers as well.

Which open-source database did Oracle gain control of by buying Sun Microsystems?

MySQL's creator, Monty Widenius, doubted Oracle would be a good owner, so after the purchase was announced in 2009 he copied the code to launch a rival called MariaDB.

Which company beat Oracle at the US Supreme Court in 2021, ending a decade-long fight over copied software code?

Google had copied about 11,500 lines into its phone software without a licence, but the court ruled 6-2 that this was fair use, sparing it damages Oracle had put in the billions.

Which AI company joined Oracle and SoftBank in the Stargate venture announced in January 2025?

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, needed vast computing power, so the partners pledged up to $500 billion for American data centres, with Abu Dhabi's MGX as a fourth backer.

Which Oracle chief executive stepped aside in September 2025 so that two co-CEOs could take over?

Safra Catz moved up to executive vice chair after 11 years at the top, handing over to Clay Magouyrk, who ran Oracle's cloud infrastructure, and Mike Sicilia of its industries arm.

Which executive, ousted as Hewlett-Packard's chief in 2010, joined Oracle a month later and rose to co-CEO?

Mark Hurd was asked to resign over inaccurate expense reports, a decision Larry Ellison called the worst since Apple's board fired Steve Jobs. He shared Oracle's top job from 2014 until his death in 2019.

Which one-word boast about security did Oracle use as its database slogan in 2002?

Unbreakable proved a dare: within months of the campaign's launch the researcher David Litchfield had published a long list of working attacks on Oracle's servers.

What caused Oracle to lay off about 10% of its workforce in 1990?

Accounting errors: salespeople had booked future licence sales in the current quarter to lift their bonuses, so Oracle had to restate its earnings twice.

Which cloud accounting-software company, part-owned by Larry Ellison, did Oracle buy for $9.3 billion in 2016?

NetSuite was started in 1998 by a former Oracle engineer with Larry Ellison's money, and the sale dragged on for months because the investor T. Rowe Price refused to sell its shares at the price offered.

Which database rival taunted Oracle with billboards before an accounting scandal jailed its chief executive?

Informix bought billboards on the freeway beside Oracle's offices to needle its bigger rival, then admitted booking sales it had not completed. Its former chief was jailed for two months, and IBM bought the database in 2001.

Which video-calling company turned to Oracle's cloud in April 2020 to cope with a surge in pandemic users?

Zoom was hosting 300 million meeting participants a day, and for the extra capacity it chose Oracle, whose cloud business sat far behind market leaders such as Amazon.

Why was Oracle's debut release in 1979 labelled version 2?

Buyers distrust a first version, Larry Ellison reasoned, so the founders skipped the number and no Oracle version 1 was ever put on sale.

Oracle's 2007 lawsuit against SAP centred on which SAP subsidiary?

TomorrowNow sold cut-price support for Oracle's software, and SAP admitted that the unit's staff had used customers' logins to download thousands of Oracle's files.

What became of Oracle's record $1.3 billion jury award against SAP?

Cut by a judge, who called the jury's figure grossly excessive, and after an appeal the companies settled in 2014 for about $360 million.

In 2000 Oracle admitted hiring detectives who tried to buy what from the offices of a rival's allies?

Their trash: the detective firm offered cleaners cash for the rubbish of a trade group that backed Oracle's biggest rival, an episode that became known as Trashgate.

Which state's health-exchange website, built by Oracle, failed at its 2013 launch?

Oregon had to enrol people with pen and paper because not one person managed to sign up on the site, and after the state and Oracle sued each other they settled in 2016.

A $115 million settlement in 2024 ended a suit accusing Oracle of what?

Tracking people online: the suit said Oracle built detailed dossiers on people who had never dealt with it, and alongside the payment it agreed to stop several kinds of tracking.

HP's 2011 lawsuit claimed Oracle broke a promise to support which microprocessor?

Itanium was the Intel chip inside HP's high-end servers, so Oracle's decision to stop writing software for it threatened that business. A jury awarded HP $3 billion in 2016.

Oracle Arena in Oakland was the home of which NBA team?

Golden State Warriors: the 10-year naming deal began in 2006, and the arena hosted five straight NBA Finals before the team left for San Francisco's Chase Center in 2019 and the Oracle letters came down.

Oracle Park is the stadium of which Major League Baseball team?

San Francisco Giants: the ballpark's first three names, Pacific Bell, SBC and AT&T, followed one phone company through two takeovers, until Oracle signed a 20-year deal in January 2019.

Which sailing trophy did Ellison's BMW Oracle Racing win in 2010?

America's Cup: the trimaran's 223-foot rigid wing worked like an aircraft's turned on end, and it beat the Swiss holder Alinghi in two straight races off Valencia to end Ellison's ten-year chase.

Oracle's sailing team trailed 8-1 in a 2013 final, then won eight straight races against which country?

New Zealand needed one more win for a week and never got it. Oracle took the series 9-8 even though it had been docked two points before the start for illegal changes to its boats.

Which Formula One team made Oracle its title sponsor in 2022, in a five-year deal reported at about $500 million?

Red Bull Racing put Oracle's name ahead of its own, and in the first season of the deal it won both the drivers' championship, with Max Verstappen, and the constructors' title.

Larry Ellison joined the board of which carmaker in December 2018 after buying three million of its shares?

Tesla had to appoint independent directors under a settlement with US securities regulators over its chief executive's tweets, and Ellison took one of two new seats on a board that grew from nine to eleven.

What stood on the site of Oracle's California headquarters until the mid-1980s?

A marine theme park: Marine World/Africa USA opened there in 1968, moved north to Vallejo in the mid-1980s and is now Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, while office towers rose on the land it left.

Which nickname did Oracle's green-glass towers in Silicon Valley earn?

The Emerald City shares its name with the capital of Oz, and its towers draw film crews: when Terminator Genisys filmed there in 2014, neighbours were warned they might hear gunfire.

What did the letter i stand for in Oracle8i, the database version released in 1999?

Internet: Oracle sold 8i as the database for internet computing, and the habit stuck, with later versions taking g for grid computing and then c for cloud.

Which company did Larry Ellison's protege Marc Benioff leave Oracle to found in 1999?

Salesforce: Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle and was made a vice president at 26, the youngest it had had, before leaving to rent out sales software over the web in competition with his old boss.

Oracle's classic demo login is scott with the password tiger, the name of what?

Family cat: the story goes that Bruce Scott, Oracle's first employee and a writer of its first three database versions, named the sample login after himself and a cat called Tiger.

Which Oracle co-founder led its engineers from 1977 to 1992 and helped create its original database software?

Bob Miner led product design from Oracle's founding until 1992. He learned in 1993 that he had cancer and left the board, but kept working on company projects until he died the next year, aged 52.

In January 2026 Oracle took a 15% stake in the new American arm of which social media app?

TikTok's US business passed to a joint venture in which Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each hold 15% and ByteDance keeps 19.9%. Oracle's cloud now holds American users' data and the app's recommendation algorithm.

Which rival did Oracle buy for $10.3 billion in 2005 after an 18-month hostile bid that the US government tried to block?

PeopleSoft fought back by promising customers large refunds if it were taken over. Oracle beat the Justice Department in court, then laid off about half of its new staff within days of completing the deal.

Which two operating systems does Oracle develop and support?

Solaris and Linux: Solaris came with the purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010, and within months Oracle had killed off OpenSolaris, the free community edition of the system.

In 1996 Larry Ellison unveiled which $500 device, with no hard drive, as a rival to the desktop PC?

The network computer fetched its programs from a central server instead of storing them. PC prices soon fell below $1,000, one of several blows that sank it, though the idea later returned as cloud computing.

When Larry Ellison gave up the chief executive's job in 2014, which title did he take alongside executive chairman?

Chief technology officer: Ellison handed the chief executive's title to two deputies in September 2014, yet every software and hardware engineering team still reported to him.

When Oracle's shares leapt in a single morning in September 2025, what did Larry Ellison briefly become?

The world's richest person: demand from AI firms for Oracle's data centres sent the shares soaring on 10 September 2025, lifting his fortune past Elon Musk's until the price slipped back by the close.

Larry Ellison bought almost all of which Hawaiian island in 2012?

Lanai was among the world's largest pineapple plantations for 70 years under Dole. Ellison bought nearly all of it from the billionaire David Murdock, who had ended the crop and built two luxury resorts.

At which electronics company did Larry Ellison meet his future Oracle co-founders?

Ampex made its name building tape recorders for Bing Crosby, who wanted to pre-record his radio show, and in the 1970s it hired Ellison as a programmer. Ellison also had a spell at the mainframe maker Amdahl.