Oracle came out when most databases were on mainframes and usually came from IBM. For the longest time, they were the only production-ready option if you had a server from the likes of DEC, Sun, or HP. That was, until MSFT came up with SQLServer, and MySQL and Postgres showed up as open-source options.

Then Oracle went into application verticals, like manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, government, etc. These were all complex applications with lots of knobs and levers to tweak, making for long contracts and a lot of professional services. To this day, a lot of their money comes from these sticky apps and long-term contracts.

Whether they were funded by CIA or not, many early software vendors needed government subsidies and contracts to survive. Oracle was also pretty late to the cloud market. They didn’t really jump in until AWS started offering Oracle license “lift and shift” along with migration support to RDS. Before that, all Oracle DBs had to be self-hosted.

This article implies the connection to CIA gives the government access to customer data. In reality, until their cloud offering, all Oracle instances were inside corporate firewalls, with no external access. I’m not a big fan of their software, but this article smells like guilt by early association.

Yesterday, Vox somehow managed to write an entire article about the history of Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison without mentioning the CIA even once. Which is pretty astounding, given the fact that Oracle takes its name from a 1977 CIA project codename. And that the CIA was Oracle’s first customer.

. . . [Oracle book author] Rosen tells of meeting with the folks at Oracle, one of whom was David Carney, formerly the number three person at the CIA. Carney had retired after 32 years there, and been hired at Oracle to head its Information Assurance Center, founded just two months after the September 11th attacks.

. . . As Ellison himself told Rosen proudly for The Naked Crowd, “The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything. The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database.”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Vox didn’t highlight Oracle’s CIA origins or its never-ending relationship with governments at all levels. But writing an explainer about Oracle without mentioning the CIA or Ellison’s post-9/11 goals or national security infrastructure strikes me as simply bizarre.