Sybase, Inc.

Python actually had been invented, but it was not as prevalent.

And then the databases that most people use in their systems were Oracle and Sybase.

And I believe Ingress was another one.

Postgres had just come out.

And then my next two, I think my next two jobs as a database administrator, again, it was just Oracle.

Um, there was a bit of SQL Server and a bit of Sybase kind of got mixed in somewhere along the line.

Um, but then kind of back to Oracle.

Okay.

...

Sybase.

Uh-

Contract?

And what he says may be the most surprising thing in this conversation.

Patrick grew up in Bakersfield, California, went to Claremont McKenna College, worked for Bain, then Oracle, then Sybase as vice president of organizational development, and then in nineteen ninety-seven, left to start The Table Group because he could not stop asking the question he had first asked at eight years old.

You should know that his first two books barely sold, and then came The Five Dysfunctions of a Team in two thousand and two, and everything changed.

That book has never left print.

But we were also doing a lot of other things that were unique.

NeXT software distribution bundled a Sybase database with every machine.

So we bundled a full function SQL database with every machine.

We bundled Mathematica, Richard Wolfram's technology, with every machine.

And they were gonna manufacture a computer and go global with it, and they were gonna put NeXTstep on every employee's desktop, and do away with their internal electronic mail system, which was called Props, that was run on their mainframes.

So they were all in.

And the deal that fell apart, and this is after I left, 'cause it was falling apart, that's why I quit, is we were gonna go with Perot Systems and ESL into the government market and into the corporate market with a Sybase database on every NeXT machine hooked into an IBM mainframe so that they could start to build desktop apps with IBM mainframe data in this proprietary NeXTstep environment, which IBM was willing to license on a non-exclusive basis, and only wanted to share with us on the royalty streams if we licensed it to anyone else.

This was at a time when Windows 2.0 was on the market.

Codd's seminal work sparked a wave of academic and commercial development.

It served as the foundation for some of the largest and most successful companies in the world, including Oracle and Sybase.

IBM and Microsoft fill out the roster of powerful companies who dominate the market for database management systems.

Yet, even with powerful tools like SQL, structuring data remains an art and science.