Larry Ellison
Ellison was born in New York City to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unwed Jewish mother. At his mother's request, he was given to his mother's aunt and uncle in Chicago to raise. Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine months old. Ellison did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48; the identity of his father is unknown.

On Ellison and his career, see The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation[2] and Symonds (2003).

During the 1970s, Ellison worked for the Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle," the abstract idea which was dismissed by a University of Chicago professor.

Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up a mere $2000 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM made this impossible by keeping secret System R's error codes. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2 – there was no Oracle 1. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.