Larry Ellison on George Koch

George Koch and his team of technical storm troopers first landed at Oracle back in 1982, in the process of evaluating database management systems for a major commercial application George was preparing to design and build. At its conclusion, George’s evaluation was characterized in ComputerWorld as the single most “grueling” study of DBMSs that had ever been conducted. The study was so tough on the vendors whose products George examined that word of it made the press as far away as New Zealand, and in publications as far afield as the Christian Science Monitor.

George began his study with 108 candidate companies, then narrowed the field to sixteen finalists, including most of the major database vendors of the time and all types of databases: network, hierarchical, relational, and others. After the rigorous final round of questions, two of the major vendors participating asked that the results of the study of their products never be published. A salesman from a third vendor quit his job at the end of one of the sessions. George knows how to ask hard questions.

Oracle, known then as Relational Software, had fewer than 25 employees at the time, and only a few major accounts. Nevertheless, when the study was completed, Oracle was announced as the winner.

George declared that ORACLE was technically the best product on the market, and that the management team looked capable enough to carry the company forward successfully. George made this radical proclamation at a time when few people even knew what the term “relational” meant; those who did (or thought they did) had few good things to say about it. Well, Oracle today has over 7,000 employees and, with revenues just short of a billion dollars in its last fiscal year, is the largest database company in the world.

KOCH Systems Corporation, the company George owned and ran at the time, became Oracle’s first VAR. KOCH developed the world’s first major commercial relational application, a securities trading and accounting system called THESIS, which is still in use today in leading banks and corporations.

Oracle was working then to refine its young product, to understand the kinds of features and functionality that would make it productive and useful in the business world; the development efforts of George and his team contributed to that refinement. Some of ORACLE’s features, such as “user exits” in SQL* FORMS, were the direct results of requests that George made of our development team. George’s continued, outspoken advocacy of an end-user bias in application design and naming conventions has influenced both a generation of programmers who learned ORACLE in his shop (many of whom have worked subsequently for Oracle), and some of the development standards toward which Oracle still works today.

George has been a friend of Oracle Corporation for a long time. His experience with ORACLE began in its earliest years, and few people are better qualified to write a major reference on Oracle products and their use. This book provides a good single source for all of Oracle’s major products, their concepts, commands, and definitions, and is a perfect complement to existing Oracle documentation and educational services.

-Lawrence J. Ellison

July 1990