I would guess pretty much all the DBMS vendors in the early 1990s had people looking at VMs and were mentally prepared for Java when it arrived. In addition to

I would guess pretty much all the DBMS vendors in the early 1990s had people looking at VMs and were mentally prepared for Java when it arrived. In addition to other advantages DBMS designers were looking for better ways to compile queries into executable representations (aka bytecode). That path still exists but I think the tendency now is to harness tools like LLVM and do JIT compilation.