Oracle (computer software)

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Oracle is a relational database management system, one of the world’s most popular database products. Founded by billionaire Larry Ellison, Oracle’s name came from a CIA project that was code-named "Oracle."

According to published revenue reports, Oracle's 2006 income exceeded 10 billion dollars, with 25% of Oracle's revenue coming from selling applications to US state and local government.

Oracle competes with Microsoft’s SQL Server and IBM’s DB2 relational databases. Oracle has traditionally served the large IT market by providing database management for large corporate systems, while SQL Server has traditionally served the small and midcap market.

As of 2007 we see a battle for market share between SQL Server and Oracle, with Oracle driving-down into the small systems market while SQL Server attempts to gather a larger share of the large systems arena.