Oracle
Oracle is foundational to enterprise digital transformation. Its database technologies have powered the world’s most demanding business-critical applications for over four decades. As AI emerges as a transformational force, it’s only natural that Oracle will deliver the infrastructure required to extract the full value from today’s AI technologies.
That focus was fully displayed at the recent Oracle Cloud World event in Las Vegas. While the company made dozens of AI-focused announcements, spanning everything from cloud services to application delivery, it is the new AI and ML features in Oracle’s flagship database that will truly enable enterprises to fully extract the value of generative AI.
Oracle announced the general availability of its Oracle Database 23c long-term support release. While the release arrives with a staggeringly large number of new features (over 300) impacting nearly every aspect of the database, including improving the developer experience, I want to focus on how the database supports and uses AI.
Vectors are integral to how generative AI operates. In a gross simplification, you can think of vectors as how AI model attributes are stored. Vector search enables the representation and efficient querying of data using vectors.
Vector Search Use Cases
Oracle introduces support for AI vector search features in Oracle Database 23c, enhancing its ability to work with unstructured data like images, documents, and videos. Below are some critical aspects of the vector search features in Oracle Database 23c:
Oracle Database 23c’s vector search features enhance the ability to work with unstructured data, providing efficient storage, retrieval, and analysis of vector data seamlessly within the database environment. Top of FormBottom of Form
Oracle Database 23c includes several enhancements to its data mining and machine learning capabilities, designed to simplify the process of building analytical models, improving predictive accuracy, and leveraging large language models. Here are the key features related to data mining and machine learning Oracle is delivering:
Integrating generative AI and LLMs offers exciting possibilities for AI-driven applications, and the natural language interaction simplifies the querying process. The improved algorithms also contribute to better predictive accuracy, making the Oracle Database a robust choice for data analytics and machine learning applications.
Oracle Database 23c is available now on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Oracle Base Database Service. Releases for Oracle Database On-premises, Exadata, Exadata Database Service, Exadata Cloud at Customer (ExaC@C), and Autonomous Database (ADB) are planned to follow later.
Oracle Database 23c is a significant release aimed at empowering developers and simplifying the integration of AI into the database. It builds upon the database’s stellar reputation for high availability, top-notch performance, and robust security.
More importantly, this release strengthens the database’s converged approach, allowing it to support JSON, XML, Graph, Spatial, Text, and Relational data for a wide range of workloads.
While Generative AI has made vector databases popular, using separate database products for different applications seems senseless and inefficient – especially if an enterprise’s data is already centralized onto an Oracle database (as nearly every Fortune 1000’s is).
Oracle’s integration of vector search changes the game for enterprise AI, allowing organizations to deploy GenAI applications with the complete safety, performance, and reliability that the Oracle Database represents.
I’ll say it again: Oracle is foundational to enterprise digital transformation. Its database technologies have powered the most demanding business-critical applications for over four decades and, as this set of announcements demonstrates, is poised to continue powering those applications well into the future.
Disclosure: Steve McDowell is an industry analyst, and NAND Research an industry analyst firm, that engages in, or has engaged in, research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, which may include those mentioned in this article. Mr. McDowell does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.