[5] Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world in 2020 by revenue and market capitalization.

[8] Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates co-founded Oracle in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL).

[24] In February 2023, the company announced it was going to invest $1.5 billion into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including opening a data centre in the country's capital, Riyadh.

[34][35] Oracle Corporation has started[36] a drive toward "wizard"-driven environments with a view to enabling non-programmers to produce simple data-driven applications.

[58] In 2022 Oracle shared a $9 billion contract from the United States Department of Defense for cloud computing with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

[74] This crisis came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once.

The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison made front-page news in Silicon Valley for three years.

Today[update] Oracle competes for new database licenses on UNIX, GNU, and Windows operating systems primarily against IBM's Db2 and Microsoft SQL Server.

EnterpriseDB, based on PostgreSQL, has recently[update] made inroads[79] by proclaiming that its product delivers Oracle compatibility features[clarification needed] at a much lower price-point.

[83] Oracle Financials was ranked in the Top 20 Most Popular Accounting Software Infographic by Capterra in 2014, beating out SAP and a number of their other competitors.

Currently[update] Oracle and SAP (the latter through its recently acquired subsidiary TomorrowNow) compete in the third-party enterprise software maintenance and support market.

[87] Some analysts have suggested the suit could form part of a strategy by Oracle Corporation to decrease competition with SAP in the market for third-party enterprise software maintenance and support.

[91] On September 1, 2011, a federal judge overturned the judgment and offered a reduced amount or a new trial, calling Oracle's original award "grossly" excessive.

On August 3, 2012, SAP and Oracle agreed on a judgment for $306 million in damages, pending approval from the U.S. district court judge, "to save time and expense of [a] new trial".

[112] In 2000, Oracle attracted attention from the computer industry and the press after hiring private investigators to dig through the trash of organizations involved in an antitrust trial against Microsoft.

However, two weeks after its introduction, David Litchfield, Alexander Kornbrust, Cesar Cerrudo and others demonstrated a whole suite of successful attacks against Oracle products.

In 2004, then-United States Attorney General John Ashcroft sued Oracle Corporation to prevent it from acquiring a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract.

[122] Computer Sciences Corporation, as the prime contractor, reportedly spent a billion dollars developing the Expeditionary Combat Support System for the United States Air Force.

It yielded no significant capability, because, according to an Air Force source, the prime contractor "was simply not up to the task of adapting" the Oracle software, on which the system was based, to meet the specialized performance criteria.

The SEC at the time alleged that the company's Indian subsidiary structured transactions with foreign governments in a way that enabled them to hold about $2.2 million of the proceeds inside funds that could be used for unauthorized purposes and therefore was a violation of the FCPA.

The SEC announced that Oracle violated the FCPA between 2014 and 2019 when its subsidiaries in India, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) created slush funds to bribe foreign officials in order to win business.

The DoJ added its heft to an already existing whistleblower lawsuit filed by Paul Frascella, who was once senior director of contract services at Oracle.

"[163] On August 13, 2010, an internal Oracle memo leaked to the Internet cited plans for ending the OpenSolaris operating system project and community.

On September 20, Oracle and HP published a joint press release announcing the resolution of the lawsuit on confidential terms and reaffirming commitment to long-term strategic partnership between the companies.

[175] On August 1, 2012, a California judge said in a tentative ruling that Oracle must continue porting its software at no cost until HP discontinues its sales of Itanium-based servers.

[179][180] On April 20, 2012, the US General Services Administration banned Oracle from the most popular portal for bidding on GSA contracts for undisclosed reasons.

Additionally, clients of Cerner have reported minimal improvements to the core system and a focus by Oracle on future advancements over resolving current issues.

On March 8, 2024, Biden said he would sign a bipartisan bill banning TikTok in the United States if the Chinese company ByteDance didn't divest.

The distinctive Oracle Parkway buildings, nicknamed the Emerald City,[198] served as sets for the futuristic headquarters of the fictional company "NorthAm Robotics" in the Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man (1999).

It was revealed in July 2022 that NASCAR's Joe Gibbs Racing team tried to sign a sponsorship with Oracle after Mars Inc. would announce they would leave JGR after the 2022 season, but the deal reportedly fell through.