Oracle AI Database 26ai by DB Alliance

Oracle Security Patching | November and December 2026

Oracle’s latest release, Database 26ai, marks a significant leap forward in database technology.

Oracle AI Database 26ai is the next long-term support release of Oracle AI Database. It includes over 300 new features with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and developer productivity.

Features such as AI Vector Search enable you to leverage a new generation of AI models to generate and store vectors of documents, images, sound, and so on; index them and quickly look for similarity while leveraging the existing analytical capabilities of Oracle AI Database. This, combined with the already extensive set of Machine Learning algorithms, enables you to quickly create sophisticated AI-enabled applications.

Oracle AI Database 26ai also uses AI to optimize many of the key database functions to make more accurate estimates on timings and resource costings.

New developer-focused features now make it simpler to build next-generation applications that use JSON or relational development approaches, or both interchangeably. New microservice and messaging functionality improves upon Oracle AI Database’s extensive support for this key design methodology.

If you need to distribute or shard your database because of regulatory or performance requirements, Oracle AI Database 26ai adds new RAFT protocol support to make it easier than ever before.

Oracle AI Database 26ai also includes significant improvements to SQL and PL/SQL, introducing new data types and language enhancements to create new or improve existing OLTP or analytical applications.

While Oracle AI Database is widely regarded as the most secure database in the industry, many new capabilities, such as SQL Firewall, enable you to control exactly what SQL is executed against your database.

To help DBAs, Oracle AI Database 26ai further refines many of the key management tasks, reducing their complexity and improving their performance, as well as introducing new functionality to simplify tasks such as reclaiming free space in tablespaces.

Oracle AI Database also adds new performance improvements both at an infrastructural level, with technologies like True Cache, and at the SQL level, ensuring some statements will execute many times faster. 

Feature Highlights of Oracle AI Database 26ai

AI Vector Search

Oracle AI Vector Search is designed for Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads and allows you to query data based on semantics, rather than keywords.

JSON Relational Duality

Data can be transparently accessed and updated as either JSON documents or relational tables. Developers benefit from the strengths of both, which are simpler and more powerful than Object Relational Mapping (ORM).

Operational Property Graphs in SQL

Developers can now build real-time graph analysis applications against operational data directly in Oracle AI Database, utilizing its industry-leading security, high availability and performance capabilities.

Microservice Support

Alongside Oracle’s already comprehensive support for microservices, new functionality makes it simpler to implement cross-service transactions.

Lock-Free Reservations

Lock-free column value reservations allow applications to reserve part of a value in a column without locking the row; for example, reserve part of a bank account balance or reserve an item in inventory without locking out all other operations on the bank account or item.

Kafka APIs for TxEventQ

Kafka applications can now run directly against Oracle AI Database with minimal code changes, leveraging high-performance Transaction Event Queues (TxEventQ).

JavaScript Stored Procedures

Developers can now create stored procedures using JavaScript in the database. This functionality also allows developers to leverage the huge number of JavaScript libraries.

Priority Transactions

Low-priority transactions that block high-priority transactions can be automatically aborted. This feature reduces the administrative burden on the DBA while maintaining high transaction throughput.

Data Use Case Domains

Data use case domains allow developers to declare the intended usage of data (columns) in a centralized and lightweight manner. For example, you can declare a column to hold an email, URL, password, currency, and so on. Applications can use data use case domains to automatically generate code or verify values.

Many Data Type and SQL Enhancements

The following features are among the many data type and SQL enhancements:

• SQL BOOLEAN Data Type

• Direct Joins for UPDATE and DELETE Statements

• Unicode 15.0 Support

• SELECT Without FROM Clause

• GROUP BY Column Alias or Position

Improved Machine Learning Algorithms

New improvements to Oracle In-Database Machine Learning algorithms make it simpler to categorize text and data while offering better performance and flexibility.

Sharding Enhancements

New functionality makes it simpler to create and manage shard replicas. New sharding models also improve the distribution of data for shard keys with few unique values.

Schema Privileges to Simplify Access Control

System privileges can now be granted at the schema level. This feature simplifies the privilege management process and, as a result, makes it easy to secure databases.

Developer Role for Application Developers

A new role allows administrators to quickly assign developers only the privileges they need to design, build, and deploy applications for Oracle AI Database.

Oracle SQL Firewall

Included in Oracle AI Database, SQL Firewall provides real-time protection against common database attacks by monitoring and blocking unauthorized SQL and SQL injection attacks, no matter the SQL execution path.

Azure AD OAuth2 Integration

New functionality enables single sign-on to Oracle AI Database service instances or on-premises Oracle AI Databases from Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Oracle AI Database as a Redis Server

Oracle AI Database provides Redis server–compatible functionality. It supports storing and caching Redis objects as database objects and automatically synchronizing them when the underlying database objects change.

The Oracle Redis Server can be configured on Oracle AI Database, Oracle Active Data Guard, and Oracle True Cache, offering added flexibility.

Unlock the Potential of Oracle AI Database 26ai with DB Alliance

At DB Alliance, we are committed to staying at the forefront of database technology.

Our team of experts is dedicated to helping you leverage the full potential of Oracle AI Database 26ai.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you upgrade and optimize your database environment.