In the 1970s, a software company called Ampex in the 1970s was designing a database called Oracle for the CIA, and Ellison was one of the programmers.

In 1977, Ellison and colleagues Robert Miner founded the Software Development Labs, where IBM published a relational database, and Ellison created a new database called Oracle.

In 1978 the company moved to Silicon Valley, renamed "relationship software company" (RSI). RSI released a commercial ORACLE product on DEC's PDP-11 computer in the summer of 1979, which integrates a more complete SQL implementation, including subqueries, connections, and other features. The CIA wanted to buy a set of software to meet their needs, but after consulting IBM, IBM found no commercially available products, and they contacted RSI. So RSI had the first customer.

The first proposed "relational database" IBM uses RSI database. 1982 and then renamed Oracle (Oracle).