I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."

When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.

Life's a journey. It's a journey about discovering limits.

I'm right, and everyone else is wrong.

Those that believe this is merely a downturn are mad. Our industry is going to mature and as something matures, the rate of innovation does slow.

You cannot innovate by copying.