I literally went down to my car and thought, 'Oh my God, SAP bought Concur - maybe tomorrow they'll buy Dairy Queen.' It was the best thing that happened to me on the day I was named CEO of Oracle.

At Oracle, silver medal is first loser.

SAP is a great company, but they have their work cut out for them if they want to compete in databases.

When we do acquisitions, we decide what we want. We decide what fills a hole. And if the price is too high, our alternative is the $5 billion we spend on R&D every year. We're not well-known for overpaying, because at Oracle we always have an alternative.

Oracle is obsessed with security. It's an absolute requirement for all our products. The real security issue is when customers take older products that were not built for the Internet, and kind of rack them and put them on the Internet.

Oracle is my second job ever that did not involve waitressing. But I still have my waitress apron just in case this does not work out. It's just that I fell in love with software when I was programming in college. When I was an investment banker, there were mostly mainframe companies and very few software ones.