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).