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A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival
The year was 1983. Larry Ellison, over at a tiny company called Oracle, was focused on the fallout of a buggy database product rewrite. In the rearview mirror, catching up quickly, was computer science professor and eventual database legend Michael Stonebraker.
In his book, Softwar, author Matthew Symonds tells the story like so:
Ellison was still not giving much of his attention to what was or wasn’t happening in sales. As far as Ellison was concerned, overwhelmingly the most important contribution he could make to Oracle’s success was to concentrate on making the product better. He simply didn’t regard himself as competent to concern himself with all the other things that a CEO is supposed to be responsible for. To some at Oracle, Ellison’s approach was one of enlightened delegation. “You could say that,” he says. “But it was closer to abdication than delegation.”
In fact, Ellison had every reason to concentrate on the product. Mike Stonebraker had taken the Ingres relational database project he had overseen at the University of California at Berkeley and formed a company around it called Relational Technology, Inc. Although a commercial version of Ingres had come to market a little later than Oracle, Stonebraker’s outfit was growing faster than Ellison’s. In 1984, Oracle’s sales had doubled to $12.7 million, while Ingres…
