An Oracle database, strictly speaking, consists of a collection of data managed by an Oracle database management system or DBMS. The term "Oracle database" sometimes refers — imprecisely — to the DBMS software itself. The title of this article — and parts of the article content — perpetuate this confusion.

One can refer to the Oracle database management system unambiguously as Oracle DBMS or (since it manages databases which have relational characteristics) as Oracle RDBMS.

Oracle Corporation itself blurs the very useful distinction between:

1. data managed by an Oracle RDBMS


2. an Oracle database, and


3. the Oracle RDBMS software itself

When it refers nowadays to the Oracle RDBMS (the software it sells for the purpose of managing databases) as the Oracle Database. The distinction between the managed data (the database) and the software which manages the data (the DBMS / RDBMS) relies, in Oracle's marketing literature, on the capitalisation of the word database.

Oracle Corporation produces and markets the Oracle DBMS, which many database applications use extensively on many popular computing platforms.

Larry Ellison and his friends and former co-workers Bob Miner and Ed Oates - who had started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) - developed the original Oracle DBMS software. They called their finished product Oracle after the code name of a CIA-funded project they had worked on while previously employed by Ampex.