Oracle Corporation
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49 free Oracle Corporation trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Oracle started in 1977 as a three-man consultancy called Software Development Laboratories, took its name from a CIA database project, and grew into one of the biggest software companies on Earth by selling a relational database that its founders built from a paper by Edgar F. Codd. Along the way it swallowed PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun Microsystems and Cerner, fought Informix, SAP, HP and Google in public, and moved its headquarters from the San Francisco Peninsula to Texas and then, on paper at least, to Tennessee. These 49 questions cover the whole arc: the founders and who became the salesman, the original company name, the 1986 IPO, the 1990 accounting crisis that nearly sank the firm, the benchmark wars, the Trashgate affair, the Unbreakable slogan, the Sun acquisition and MySQL, the $1.3 billion SAP jury award, Oracle Team USA's 1-8 America's Cup comeback, the Red Bull Formula One deal, the Stargate joint venture and the 2025 co-CEOs. Easy questions ask about Larry Ellison's protege who founded Salesforce; the expert tier asks about employee number four and the Belmont street where the company used to live. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation. Play solo or print it for a tech-industry quiz night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01To which city did Oracle announce in December 2020 that it was moving its headquarters out of Silicon Valley?
Austin, Texas
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.
Q 02Software Development Laboratories later renamed itself Oracle after what?
Its main product
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.
Q 03Oracle takes its name from the codename of a database project for which US government agency?
The CIA
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.
Q 04Oracle's founders reportedly judged Larry Ellison the weakest programmer among them, so which job did he take?
Salesman
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.
Q 05Whose 1970 paper on relational databases inspired Oracle's founders?
Edgar F. Codd
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.
Q 06Oracle went public in March 1986, one day before which other software company?
Microsoft
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.
Q 07Oracle moved its world headquarters in 1989 to which California neighbourhood?
Redwood Shores
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.
Q 08In 2013 Oracle moved its listing from Nasdaq to which market?
NYSE
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.
Q 09In April 2024 Oracle announced a future headquarters move to which city?
Nashville
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.
Q 10Cerner, which Oracle bought in 2022 for about $28 billion, worked in which field?
Health information technology
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.
Q 11Larry Ellison makes a brief appearance as himself in which 2010 film?
Iron Man 2
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.
Q 12Which programming language came to Oracle with its 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems?
Java
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.
Q 13Which open-source database did Oracle gain control of by buying Sun Microsystems?
MySQL
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.
Q 21Which database rival taunted Oracle with billboards before an accounting scandal jailed its chief executive?
Informix
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.
Q 22Which video-calling company turned to Oracle's cloud in April 2020 to cope with a surge in pandemic users?
Zoom
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.
Q 23Why was Oracle's debut release in 1979 labelled version 2?
Buyers distrust a first version
Q 14Which 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.
Q 15Which AI company joined Oracle and SoftBank in the Stargate venture announced in January 2025?
OpenAI
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.
Q 16Which Oracle chief executive stepped aside in September 2025 so that two co-CEOs could take over?
Safra Catz
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.
Q 17Which executive, ousted as Hewlett-Packard's chief in 2010, joined Oracle a month later and rose to co-CEO?
Mark Hurd
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.
Q 18Which one-word boast about security did Oracle use as its database slogan in 2002?
Unbreakable
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.
Q 19What caused Oracle to lay off about 10% of its workforce in 1990?
Accounting errors
Accounting errors: salespeople had booked future licence sales in the current quarter to lift their bonuses, so Oracle had to restate its earnings twice.
Q 20Which cloud accounting-software company, part-owned by Larry Ellison, did Oracle buy for $9.3 billion in 2016?
NetSuite
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.
Buyers distrust a first version, Larry Ellison reasoned, so the founders skipped the number and no Oracle version 1 was ever put on sale.
Q 24Oracle's 2007 lawsuit against SAP centred on which SAP subsidiary?
TomorrowNow
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.
Q 25What became of Oracle's record $1.3 billion jury award against SAP?
Cut by a judge
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.
Q 26In 2000 Oracle admitted hiring detectives who tried to buy what from the offices of a rival's allies?
Their trash
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.
Q 27Which state's health-exchange website, built by Oracle, failed at its 2013 launch?
Oregon
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.
Q 28A $115 million settlement in 2024 ended a suit accusing Oracle of what?
Tracking people online
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.
Q 29HP's 2011 lawsuit claimed Oracle broke a promise to support which microprocessor?
Itanium
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.
Q 30Oracle Arena in Oakland was the home of which NBA team?
Golden State Warriors
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.