Oracle Gives 'Unbreakable' Database To Feds

ByDoug Bartholomew America's true Lord of the Files, database software king Larry Ellison, chairman and CEO of Oracle Corp., says his company has given the federal government a free copy of its ultra-secure software to create a "national security database." Speaking before an audience of thousands of software developers, customers and the media at the company's annual OpenWorld trade show in San Francisco, the outspoken Ellison said he made good on his controversial Oct. 8 promise in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece to help the federal government set up a national database containing information on all individuals for security purposes. "I made an offer of free software for a national security database, and that software has in fact been delivered," Ellison says. He added that his company got its name from "a project I worked on for the Central Intelligence Agency, which was our very first customer." Oracle's new advertising slogan, "Oracle is Unbreakable," refers to the company's dual claims that its latest database is at once failure-proof and hacker-proof. Ellison said that 10 times as many hackers had tried to break into the company's files through its Web site since the campaign was launched. "Zero times they broke in," he says. "People who are not authorized to look inside our database can't." Ellison says his advertising people warned against adopting a campaign slogan that bragged that the Oracle database was "unbreakable." "They said everybody from the Soviet Union to Redmond, Wash. will be attacking our site." Oracle's latest release, the Oracle9i Application Server Release 2, runs on so-called "clusters" of computer servers linked together. The idea is to provide fault-tolerance so that if one computer or one piece of software fails, the overall system will continue to run with no impairment of service on other machines.