[gagejustins]

Hello everyone, author here. I wrote this post after wondering why Oracle is such a ubiquitous name, but almost no developers I've worked with have ever used it. After some research and conversations with a former employee, it turns out that the story is really interesting: Oracle was basically the first company to commercialize a RDBMS. And today they have what might be the fastest, most performant database at scale – if you're willing to pay for it.

[hindsightbias]

The intersection of HN and Enterprise developers on a venn diagram, anecdata aside, is not very large.

[gregjor]

That’s putting it mildly. Developers who don’t know about Oracle and enterprise-scale databases are like car designers who haven’t heard of Ford.

This is why HN teems with NoSQL database nonsense and ideas like 100K rows is a scaling problem.

[derwiki]

IBM worked on an RDBMS in 1974, and Honeywell released a commercial RDBMS in 1976* before Oracle launched.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics_Relational_Data_Store

[gagejustins]

Weird, everything I've read said the contrary, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/business/edgar-f-codd-79-...

[gregjor]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd