Oracle Dips A Toe Into IBM’s EBCDIC World

August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM’s Ted Codd may have invented the relational database back at the Almaden Lab in the early 1970s, but it was Larry Ellison’s Oracle that offered the world the first wildly commercially successful RDBMs. Technically, the System/38 was announced, with its integrated relational database, before the first version of Oracle was announced.

Since then, Oracle and IBM have competed intensely to win and run transactional database workloads for some of the biggest enterprises around. But there was always one key difference between the two companies’ offerings: Oracle used an ASCI character set while the IBM midrange and mainframe systems relied …