How CIA stole Oracle from the Russians

Dear readers,

At the UKOUG conference in Birmingham last week, the OakTable got a new member - Kurt van Meerbeeck from Belgium - the author of DUDE, Pepi and Pretoria, and a guy with a slight hint of humour.

His presentation had people laughing rather hard, and so I've chosen to publish his theory on Oracle's origin - in other words, how CIA stole the source code from the Russians, who had developed it originally!

Here we go, in Kurt's own words:

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I believe, to truely understand X$ tables you need to have some basic knowledge of an eastern european language ... just to even pronounce them. Now - Oracle used to be named after a CIA project right ?

And Oracle hasexisted ... for how long now... 31 years ?

I think the Americans stole the source code from the Russians during the cold war - and asked Larry and his team to read in the tape (they were developing tape driver software weren't they).

Probably they were expecting some list of agents and I can imaging the CIA was quite dissapointed when they saw this source code full of X$ garble.

I guess they told Larry he could keep the tapes and on he went revealing this relational database power... of course they couldn't use the X$ stuff so they wrote V$ views on top of them ... so people could understand...

It's not a coincidence that after the fall of the Berlin wall a *lot* of features were added - Oracle 6 was almost a complete rewrite !!!

So to end this - and you are probably wondering about this ... how come Jonathan Lewis is such a wiz in X$ tables ???

There's only one explanation - MI6 ! His codename was probably OO-600 ... with a license to kill your instance ;-) (math-teacher ... yeah - right !)
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Perhaps it should be pronounced 006-hundred?