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50 free Oracle Corporation trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Oracle started in 1977 as a three-man consultancy called Software Development Laboratories, took its name from a CIA database project, and grew into one of the biggest software companies on Earth by selling a relational database that its founders built from a paper by Edgar F. Codd. Along the way it swallowed PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun Microsystems and Cerner, fought Informix, SAP, HP and Google in public, and moved its headquarters from the San Francisco Peninsula to Texas and then, on paper at least, to Tennessee. These 50 questions cover the whole arc: the founders and who became the salesman, the original company name, the 1986 IPO, the 1990 accounting crisis that nearly sank the firm, the benchmark wars, the Trashgate affair, the Unbreakable slogan, the Sun acquisition and MySQL, the $1.3 billion SAP jury award, Oracle Team USA's 1-8 America's Cup comeback, the Red Bull Formula One deal, the Stargate joint venture and the 2025 co-CEOs. Easy questions ask about Larry Ellison's protege who founded Salesforce; the expert tier asks about employee number four and the Belmont street where the company used to live. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation. Play solo or print it for a tech-industry quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01To which city did Oracle move its world headquarters from Redwood Shores in 2020?
Austin, Texas
Oracle announced the move from Redwood Shores to Austin in December 2020, after opening an East Riverside office there in 2018.
Q 02In which year was Oracle co-founded in Santa Clara, California?
1977
Bob Miner, Ed Oates and Larry Ellison started the company on June 16, 1977.
Q 03Under what name was Oracle originally founded?
Software Development Laboratories
It became Relational Software, Inc in 1979 and Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983 to match its flagship database.
Q 04Which US government agency was Oracle's first customer?
The CIA
The company's name came from the codename of a 1977 database project for the agency, and Oracle got permission to reuse it.
Q 05The three founders decided Larry Ellison was the worst programmer, so he took which role?
Salesman
Ellison understood both customers and the technology and used demo database tables to show customers the power of SQL.
Q 06Whose 1970 paper on relational databases inspired Oracle's founders?
Edgar F. Codd
The paper was titled "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks."
Q 07In which year did Oracle hold its initial public offering?
1986
The IPO came on March 12, 1986, three years after a newsletter called Oracle the most comprehensive database offering it had seen.
Q 08Oracle moved its world headquarters in 1989 to which California neighbourhood?
Redwood Shores
The Redwood City campus was not finished until 1995 and remained the headquarters until 2020.
Q 09In 2013 Oracle moved its listing from Nasdaq to which market?
NYSE
At the time it was the largest-ever US market transfer.
Q 10In April 2024 Oracle announced a future headquarters move to which city?
Nashville
The planned Tennessee complex was billed as Oracle's largest office hub, with 8,500 jobs, though no timeframe was given.
Q 11Cerner, bought by Oracle in 2022, worked in which field?
Health information technology
The deal closed in 2022 and was Oracle's largest acquisition ever.
Q 12Where was Cerner headquartered?
Kansas City, Missouri
The company now trades as Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences.
Q 13In which year did Oracle complete its acquisition of Sun Microsystems?
2010
The deal was worth more than $7 billion and turned Oracle into a hardware maker as well as a software company.
Q 21Oracle's 1990s rescue investment came from a Japanese company in which industry?
Steel
Ken Jacobs called it a near death experience; new executives Jeff Henley and Raymond J. Lane were brought in to recover.
Q 22Bob MacDonald of which rival database company called Oracle "the evil empire"?
Informix
Oracle's own Mike Humphries described his company as the Klingons of the Bay Area.
Q 23Which rival database CEO ended up in jail after his obsessive war with Larry Ellison?
Phil White
A 2005 book chronicled the three-year battle, which made front-page news in Silicon Valley.
Q 14Which open-source database did Oracle gain control of through the Sun deal?
MySQL
Sun had bought the database in 2008, and the European Commission delayed the deal over it before approving unconditionally.
Q 15Which company did Oracle sue over Java packages used in Android?
The two companies failed to agree a licence, so the defendant built its own platform containing 37 copied Java packages.
Q 16Which investment firm joined Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank in the Stargate venture?
MGX
The Abu Dhabi firm later took a stake in TikTok's US operations alongside Oracle and Silver Lake.
Q 17Who became Oracle's co-CEOs in September 2025?
Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia
Magouyrk had run cloud infrastructure and Sicilia the industries group.
Q 18For how many years was Safra Catz Oracle's CEO before stepping aside in 2025?
11
She moved to a new role as executive vice chair after holding the top job since 2014.
Q 19Which one-word slogan did Oracle use for its database in 2002?
Unbreakable
Within two weeks security researchers including David Litchfield demonstrated a suite of successful attacks against Oracle products.
Q 20What caused Oracle to lay off about 10% of its workforce in 1990?
Accounting errors
Salespeople had booked future licence sales in the current quarter to boost bonuses, and Oracle had to restate earnings twice.
Q 24Which database vendor was Oracle's first major competitor?
Ingres
Oracle's strategy was to focus on one opponent at a time, which later caused it to neglect Sybase as a threat.
Q 25Oracle's 2007 lawsuit against SAP centred on which SAP subsidiary?
TomorrowNow
The subsidiary was accused of using former Oracle customers' accounts to download patches and support documents.
Q 26How much did a 2010 jury order SAP to pay Oracle for copyright infringement?
$1.3 billion
A judge later called the award grossly excessive and the sides settled on a $306 million judgment in 2012.
Q 27In the 2000 Trashgate affair, whose janitors were offered $1,200 by Oracle's sleuths?
Association for Competitive Technology
The reported offer was $1,200 to look through trash belonging to a rival; Larry Ellison called the snooping a public service.
Q 28Which state's health-exchange website, built by Oracle, failed at its 2013 launch?
Oregon
Registrations had to be taken on paper, both sides sued each other in 2014, and a settlement worth over $100 million followed in 2016.
Q 29Oracle settled a class action over online tracking in 2024 for how much?
$115 million
The suit filed by Lieff Cabraser alleged surveillance of the general population via their digital existence.
Q 30HP's 2011 lawsuit claimed Oracle broke a promise to support which microprocessor?
Itanium
HP was awarded $3 billion in damages in 2016 and the decision stood despite Oracle's appeal plans.