Oracle Academy was pleased to host a webinar on February 12, 2026, titled “Oracle Academy Faculty Day: The Future of Teaching and Research: Integrating AI with Databases” for approximately 200 member educators in the Asia Pacific region, as well as prospective member educators exploring Oracle Academy resources.

The session focused on practical ways to bring AI-enabled database capabilities into higher education, sharing guidance for using generative AI in teaching and research and introducing Oracle Academy’s AI-related curriculum and classroom-ready resources.

The webinar opened with welcome remarks from Damian Haas, Oracle Academy JAPAC Regional Director. Jean Shin, Oracle Academy Program Manager, then outlined Oracle Academy’s curriculum materials and software/application tools. She highlighted how faculty can efficiently find and use content—especially AI-focused resources—through the Oracle Academy Member Hub, and explained how educators can manage student accounts and run practice-based learning. She also shared streamlined ways to access key platforms and tools that support instruction.

From natural-language queries to governed AI in Oracle AI Database

Kalyan Lalam, Master Principal Solution Engineer, Oracle Cloud Engineering team, introduced AI capabilities aligned with Oracle Academy’s database curriculum, including Applied Database Systems using Oracle AI Database. He showcased Select AI in Oracle Autonomous Database, which lets users ask questions in natural language so the database can generate and run SQL or explain results, and noted integrations with OCI Generative AI, OpenAI, and Azure OpenAI.

One of the core themes was RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). Because general-purpose LLMs may not have access to current internal information and can produce plausible but incorrect answers, RAG retrieves relevant content from databases or document repositories and adds it to the prompt to produce more grounded responses. He emphasized that RAG can use up-to-date enterprise data without fine-tuning models on sensitive datasets, which can be beneficial for security.

The session also covered Oracle AI Vector Search; he noted that separate vector databases can introduce synchronization, security, and operational complexity, while running vector search inside the core database can simplify operations.

As a final part of the presentation, he highlighted Data Studio as an end-to-end tool for data discovery/cataloguing, loading and transformation, analysis, and sharing, with AI assistance, PII detection, and governed sharing via Delta Sharing and Cloud Links.

Kalyan concluded by underscoring the importance of data strategy and governance—understanding data sources, internal data movement, access controls, sharing boundaries, and whether datasets include PII—as a foundation for compliance and trusted analytics and AI adoption.

Oracle Academy’s expanded, classroom-ready AI teaching resources

In the next session, Jian Li, Oracle Academy Principal Instructor, outlined new ways Oracle Academy has brought AI features into the classroom. He revisited its database curriculum pathway and highlighted free teaching and learning resources delivered through Oracle Academy platforms such as Oracle APEX, Oracle Autonomous Database on OCI, SQL Developer, Data Modeler, Live SQL, and MySQL.

He also presented updated AI-focused learning offerings available through a dedicated Artificial Intelligence filter in the Member Hub course catalog, spanning Education Bytes, workshops, and hands-on activities using Oracle Red Bull Racing data and Oracle Analytics Cloud, alongside full course curriculum: AI with Machine Learning in Java and Applied Database Systems.

A featured workshop on embedding Generative AI in an APEX application introduced RAG concepts and showed how a defined data source—such as an autonomous database—can be used to return natural language responses. The workshop also demonstrated a digital assistant style chatbot that had been configured to answer only questions related to the application’s topic, helping keep responses controlled and relevant.

This Oracle Academy Faculty Day webinar brought data governance, the use of generative AI, vector search and RAG, and curriculum design into a single, coherent narrative. For educators already using the Oracle Academy curriculum, it provided a timely opportunity to explore updates aligned with current technology trends and to incorporate them into their courses.

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