A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival

The year was 1983. Larry Ellison, over at a tiny company called Oracle, was focused on the fallout of a buggy database product rewrite. In the rearview mirror, catching up quickly, was computer science professor and eventual database legend Michael Stonebraker.

In his book, Softwar, author Matthew Symonds tells the story like so:

Ellison was still not giving much of his…