Welcome to the first edition of Monthly Product Pulse, your essential digest of Oracle’s latest technical resources, feature enhancements, and key community events. This month, we’re spotlighting innovations across AI, database technologies, and developer tooling—all designed to streamline your journey from experimentation to production. Discover what’s new and how you can leverage Oracle’s robust ecosystem to accelerate your projects and connect with the global Oracle community.

Feature Spotlights & Technical Releases

RAG the Easy Way with Oracle AI Vector Search, LangChain4J, OracleEmbeddingStore, and Oracle Database 23ai

Oracle is making Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in Java straightforward with the debut of LangChain4J’s langchain4j-oracle extension. Seamlessly integrating with Oracle Database 23ai, developers can now implement high-performance, scalable vector search for generative AI projects with minimal overhead.
Explore the step-by-step guide: Read more.

The LangChain4J AI Services API — Effortless RAG Services in Java

The new AiServices API in LangChain4J is transforming how developers build rich RAG services in Java. Integrate Oracle AI Vector Search, OracleEmbeddingStore, and leverage chat memory with moderation to create robust, production-ready applications.
Dive into the details: Read more.

The LangChain4J Agentic AI API — Building Dynamic RAG Agents

LangChain4J’s Agentic AI API brings agent-driven RAG workflows to Java developers. Powered by Oracle AI Vector Search and AgenticServices, this API enables highly dynamic and customizable agentic AI applications.
Get started with agentic RAG: Read more.

Build Oracle AI Apps with .NET Vectors and Semantic Kernel

.NET developers can now harness the new Oracle Database Vector Store Connector for Semantic Kernel, streamlining the process of building advanced AI applications with Oracle’s vector search capabilities. Read more. 

APEX Updates

OKV Endpoint Group for Autonomous Container Database (ACD)

Customers can now specify and modify Oracle Key Vault (OKV) endpoint groups when provisioning or managing ACD, ensuring greater alignment with organizational security requirements and advanced control over encryption keys.
Learn more.

CS_SESSION Package & Apache Iceberg Support

  • CS_SESSION Package: Offers granular control to dynamically switch the database service and consumer group within an existing session.
  • Apache Iceberg Table Format: Query Apache Iceberg tables natively as external table sources, part of the major Oracle with Iceberg launch at AI World.
    Documentation | Iceberg

External Table Caching (23ai)

Frequently accessed external table data is now cached within the database layer, resulting in seamless, accelerated access and improved query performance—no application changes required.
Find out more.

Oracle Database@AWS Endorsed for MAA Silver/Gold

Oracle MAA has evaluated and endorsed Oracle Database@AWS for MAA Silver and Gold reference architectures, supporting both cross-zone and cross-region deployments.

.NET Development Quick Start & SQL Best Practices

LiveLab: .NET Development with Oracle Autonomous Database
Learn to set up a .NET web server on Oracle Cloud, connect to Autonomous Database, and deploy an ASP.NET Core web app in about an hour.

See more. 

Avoid INSERT Column Mismatch Errors and More 23.9 Goodies

A detailed demo of the new INSERT … SET and INSERT … BY NAME clauses in 23.9 and other new enhancements.

Watch more.

How to Update Columns from Another Table Using Oracle SQL

Master direct join syntax and alternative approaches in Oracle 23ai and earlier releases for bulk updates.
Read the blog.

Faster PL/SQL in SQL: Automatic SQL Transpiler

Discover how the Automatic SQL Transpiler increases the performance of PL/SQL function calls within SQL.
Explore the feature.

Python Data Classes Make it Easy to Fetch Database Rows as Objects

A brief, insightful post showing how easy it is to fetch rows from Oracle Database in Python as instances of a user defined class.

Read more.

New Tcl Oratcl Fork Makes Deployment Easy

The third-parth Tcl language driver “oratcl” has been forked and built on top of Oracle’s ODPI-C wrapper to make it much easier to deploy.

Learn more. 

Application and Database Type Mismatches Slow Down Data Loads

When loading data into Oracle Database, the performance bottle neck is sometimes the round-trip overheads, and sometimes the optimizer plan. This post shows Python code where data loading performance is improved by binding the correct data types.

See more. 

Using Python for Data Analysis and AI

Resources for using Python with Oracle Database for Analysis and AI workloads.

Check more. 

Community & Learning Highlights

  • MySQL 9.4 — Thank You for Your Contributions: Read the post
  • Oracle & the AI Revolution (Live from TechCrunch): Watch now
  • MySQL Basics & MySQL AI Announcements: Check out a series of foundational and advanced guides on MySQL databases and Oracle’s AI-powered enhancements. Visit the blog series
  • Inside MySQL Podcast:
  • MySQL Shorts:

From major AI integrations in Java and .NET to advanced database security and performance features, September brings a wealth of innovation for Oracle developers and database professionals. Stay tuned for our next Product Pulse—and in the meantime, explore these updates to keep your skills sharp and your solutions ahead of the curve.