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Oct. 13, 2024
Oracle Database 23ai: Ushering in the Future of AI-Powered Data Management
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Oct. 13, 2024
Oracle is releasing Oracle Database 23ai, a groundbreaking advancement in database technology that marks a pivotal shift in how organizations manage, leverage, and derive insights from their data. This new release highlights Oracle's commitment to enhancing developer productivity and embedding cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities within its flagship database platform. After years of development, Oracle Database 23ai—previously known as Oracle Database 23c—takes center stage as a solution tailored to meet the evolving needs of modern enterprises.
Oracle Database 23ai is designed to help developers, database administrators (DBAs), and data scientists unlock the full potential of their data while ensuring security, reliability, and ease of use. By seamlessly integrating AI into core database functionalities, Oracle aims to transform how businesses interact with and extract value from data. Let’s take a deep dive into the innovative features and capabilities that set Oracle Database 23ai apart.
The naming change from Oracle Database 23c to 23ai reflects the growing importance of AI in data management. AI is no longer an add-on but a core functionality that defines how organizations operate, innovate, and compete. Oracle’s new database enables businesses to fully embrace AI-driven operations, offering them tools to analyze data in real-time, automate tasks, and improve decision-making processes with unprecedented accuracy and speed.
The Oracle Database 23ai release focuses on three strategic pillars:
AI for Data: Empowering organizations to seamlessly incorporate AI into data-driven applications.
Dev for Data: Simplifying application development by reducing complexity and enabling faster time-to-market.
Mission Critical for Data: Ensuring high availability, performance, and scalability for business-critical applications.
The core objective of the AI for Data initiative is to provide users with tools to easily integrate AI into their applications and business processes. This involves two key elements: embedding AI functionality into database operations and using AI to augment Oracle's data management features.
AI Vector Search: Powering Intelligent Data Retrieval
At the heart of Oracle Database 23ai is AI Vector Search, a revolutionary technology that bridges the gap between large language models (LLMs) and organizational data. By converting documents, images, and other data objects into multi-dimensional vectors, Oracle enables users to perform powerful similarity searches. This is especially critical for businesses that want to enhance the performance of AI models by providing contextually relevant data from their databases.
Oracle's AI Vector Search allows organizations to augment the knowledge of LLMs—such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini—with proprietary business data, making AI responses more accurate and tailored. This is achieved through a new data type and vector indexing, which seamlessly integrates vector searches into SQL queries.
With AI Vector Search, developers and analysts can unlock new insights from vast datasets by combining traditional SQL queries with similarity-based searches. This feature empowers users to augment their AI models with real-time business data, improving the accuracy of customer insights, fraud detection, and personalized recommendations.
Secure Encoding of Data with ONNX
Security is a top priority, and Oracle Database 23ai introduces a solution for securely encoding objects within the database using trusted AI models. The platform’s support for the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) standard enables organizations to load and run AI models directly in the database. This ensures that sensitive data is encoded and processed without needing to rely on third-party services, thus mitigating security risks.
Natural Language Querying with LLM Integration
Oracle Database 23ai aims to democratize data access by making it easier for non-technical users to interact with data. With natural language querying, users can simply ask complex questions in plain language—such as, "What were the top-selling products last year for customers under 30?" Oracle's LLM integration will interpret these queries, convert them into SQL, and retrieve the relevant data. This significantly lowers the barrier for users to engage with their data and enhances productivity across the organization.
Oracle Database 23ai was designed with developers in mind, focusing on reducing the complexity of interacting with databases while allowing faster development cycles. The most notable feature in this regard is JSON Relational Duality, a game-changing approach to handling structured and semi-structured data.
JSON Relational Duality: Bridging the Gap
In modern application development, teams often struggle with choosing between a relational database model and a NoSQL/JSON model. With JSON Relational Duality, Oracle Database 23ai offers the best of both worlds. Developers can work with the simplicity of JSON while benefiting from the power and consistency of relational databases—all within a single platform.
JSON Relational Duality allows developers to create JSON views on top of relational tables, enabling them to build applications that leverage both document-based and relational approaches. This eliminates the need for complex Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks, reduces data duplication, and simplifies database interactions, making development faster and more efficient.
Enhancing SQL Usability
Recognizing that SQL remains a vital language for developers, Oracle Database 23ai introduces several enhancements that simplify its use. These include:
New data types like Boolean and Vector.
Improvements to SQL readability, such as removing the need for "from dual" in simple queries.
Support for table value constructors to simplify insert and select operations.
Enhanced aggregation over interval data types.
These improvements, among others, make SQL more powerful and accessible, allowing developers to focus on building business logic rather than wrestling with database intricacies.
Oracle is synonymous with reliability, and the Mission Critical for Data pillar of Oracle Database 23ai builds on that legacy by introducing a suite of features designed to support the most demanding applications.
Globally Distributed Databases with Raft Replication
For organizations that need to distribute data across multiple geographies—whether for regulatory compliance or to reduce latency—Oracle Database 23ai introduces Raft replication. This consensus-based protocol ensures automatic replication and sub-second failover across globally distributed databases, providing continuous business operations even in the event of a shard failure.
SQL Firewall: Enhancing Database Security
In a world where data breaches are becoming increasingly common, Oracle Database 23ai introduces the SQL Firewall, a new security feature that prevents unauthorized SQL execution. By learning the typical SQL queries executed by an organization, the SQL Firewall builds an "allow list" of queries and blocks or logs any unauthorized attempts. This is an essential defense against SQL injection attacks and internal threats, ensuring that only approved queries can access sensitive data.
True Cache: A Revolution in Database Caching
Oracle Database 23ai also addresses the challenges of caching data at the application tier with True Cache, a new feature that acts as a diskless Oracle instance in front of the primary database. This feature ensures that cached data remains consistent with the primary database and minimizes the need for complex caching logic at the application level.
Oracle Database 23ai is more than just an incremental update—it is a transformative platform that integrates AI into the core of data management. By enabling organizations to harness the power of AI, simplifying development processes, and ensuring the highest levels of security and reliability, Oracle has created a solution that is poised to redefine how businesses interact with their data.
With over 300 new features, Oracle Database 23ai provides a comprehensive platform for managing the data-driven enterprises of tomorrow. Whether you’re a developer, data scientist, or DBA, Oracle Database 23ai offers the tools and technologies you need to unlock new insights, drive innovation, and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape.
For organizations looking to stay at the forefront of technological innovation, Oracle Database 23ai is the solution that will help them turn their data into actionable intelligence, ensuring they are prepared for the AI-powered future.
