There were academic systems that (a) didn't use the SQL langauge (b) came before Oracle, but wasn't commercialized as quickly as Oracle.
Oracle's biggest business decision was standardizing on IBM's standards, according to Ingres founder Mike Stonebraker. Hugh Darwen and Paul McJones have all had stories about this. One source is: http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/ DB2 was also only funded by IBM on the premise that DB2 would increase disk storage sales: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/database_apps/s...
Oracle's biggest business decision was standardizing on IBM's standards, according to Ingres founder Mike Stonebraker. Hugh Darwen and Paul McJones have all had stories about this. One source is: http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/ DB2 was also only funded by IBM on the premise that DB2 would increase disk storage sales: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/database_apps/s...