delphi was originally one of many codenames of a pre-release development tool project at borland. borland developer danny thorpe suggested the "delphi" codename in reference to the oracle at delphi. one of the design goals of the product was to provide database connectivity to programmers as a key feature and a popular database package at the time was oracle database; hence, "if you want to talk to [the] oracle, go to delphi".