Oracle AI Database 26ai architects AI into the core of data management, furthering Oracle’s commitment to help customers securely bring AI to all their data, everywhere. This milestone advances Oracle’s “AI for Data” vision of a next-generation AI-native database with use of AI across the entire data and development stack, including AI Vector Search, AI for Database Management, AI for Data Development, AI for Application Development, and AI for Analytics. Customers can now run dynamic agentic AI workflows to provide sophisticated answers and actions that combine private database data with public information.
Oracle AI Database’s built-in AI capabilities provide customers wide freedom of choice when building and deploying AI applications including support for: the Apache Iceberg open table format; Model Context Protocol (MCP); industry-leading LLMs; popular agentic AI frameworks; and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) embedding models. Oracle AI Database’s mission-critical functionality brings AI to data securely, efficiently, and reliably wherever it resides—Oracle Cloud, leading hyperscale clouds, private cloud, or on-premises.
What Industry Experts Are Saying
“Great AI needs great data. With Oracle AI Database 26ai, customers get both. It’s the single place where their business data lives—current, consistent, and secure. And it’s the best place to use AI on that data without moving it. To help simplify and accelerate AI adoption, AI Database 26ai includes impressive new AI features that go beyond AI Vector Search. A highlight is Oracle’s architecting Agentic AI into the database, enabling customers to build, deploy, and manage their own in-database AI agents using a no-code visual platform that includes pre-built agents. As Oracle’s converged database leadership in transaction processing goes unchallenged, its leadership position in the data and AI space continues to rise sharply as well.”
—Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“Oracle has cemented its leadership as the database for mission-critical workloads—which are even more critical in the AI era, as agents need transactions to run successfully and they move to create even more transactions than possible with their human counterparts. With Oracle AI Database 26ai, Oracle enables its customers to successfully move into the AI era, leveraging their existing investments in software, skills and know-how. For Oracle customers it’s not ‘bring the data to AI,’ but it’s ‘AI comes to the data’—and with that, organizations can leverage their existing investments and software assets.”
—Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“Time and complexity are absolutely not the friends of GenAI LLM users. Oracle recognized these issues several years ago and made it their mission to fix these problems. Oracle made huge strides with the release of Oracle AI Database 23ai. But the release of its latest AI Database, 26ai, takes it to a whole new level by significantly accelerating time-to-value while radically reducing complexity. Its innovative AI-powered features are set to transform how organizations unlock insights, boost performance, and reimagine what’s possible with their data.”
—Marc Staimer, Sr. Contributor to theCUBEresearch
“The rise of agentic AI is further manifested in the release of Oracle AI Database 26ai. By building agentic AI capabilities directly into its database, Oracle enables a new class of dynamic, data-driven applications where intelligence and automation are native features. No one can match Oracle’s breadth of integrated AI features combined with its focus on enterprise-grade security, data integrity, and massive scalability. This release further raises Oracle’s position as a trusted partner for organizations navigating the complexities of AI-driven transformation.”
—Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst & Founder, NAND Research
“As the saying goes ‘there is no AI without data.’ And Oracle databases hold the world’s most valuable data that is now critical for organizations to adopt AI into their business processes. The latest release, Oracle AI Database 26ai, incorporates AI into the core of data management, making it easier for customers to do much more than RAG with AI Vector Search. This new release unifies search across traditional internal data, including real-time operational data, graph, JSON, and AI vectors; enables customers to build, deploy, and manage custom AI agents; and team up agents to work on tasks. Oracle is turning its converged database into an AI powerhouse that even non-Oracle users should consider.”
—Carl Olofson, Principal Analyst, DBMSGuru LLC
“IDC surveys show that more than 80% of organizations report having a strategy for adopting and utilizing AI technologies, with nearly all investing in or embedding generative AI across their operations. In a recent IDC survey, 34.3% of organizations view AI as a driver of business transformation. Oracle is aligning with this trend as one of the first cloud database providers to bring AI to data, offering built-in vector embedding and search across LLMs and internal data. With Oracle AI Database 26ai, the company introduces additional built-in AI capabilities that enable customers to build, deploy, and manage custom AI agents, coordinate tasks among teams of agents, and use AI to develop trusted applications. Oracle provides flexibility for customers to implement AI through MCP Server, leading LLMs, agentic frameworks, and ONNX embedding models, available across multicloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. These enhancements illustrate Oracle’s focus on meeting customer requirements for built-in AI in business processes.”
—Devin Pratt, Research Director, IDC
“Oracle AI Database 26ai makes Agentic AI a first-class citizen both inside and outside the database, safely and securely. Inside the database, the embedded MCP Server and storage of data privacy rules with the data ensures that agents won’t breach confidentiality. Outside the database, new Oracle Private AI Services Containers keep those guardrails in place when data is consumed by third-party AI services. And by extending Select AI, SQL developers can now trigger agents at their fingertips.”
—Tony Baer, Principal, dbInsight
“Oracle’s integration of AI directly into its AI Database 26ai shifts AI functionality from an add-on to a core capability. Embedding agentic AI enables enterprises to leverage context-rich reasoning across both private and public data, driving more actionable and higher-quality outcomes. This approach sets a new standard for enterprise AI platforms by emphasizing openness, integration, and security—positioning AI Database 26ai as a forward-looking model for building AI-ready data infrastructure.”
—Matt Kimball, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
“In the era of AI and cloud, security is becoming existential. The threat landscape now extends far beyond ransomware to include AI-specific risks such as data leaks from LLMs, malicious prompts, unauthorized data access by AI agents, and, sooner than many expect, quantum computers capable of breaking today’s encryption. True to its updated branding, Oracle AI Database 26ai takes these challenges seriously, extending its built-in security features to address these AI scenarios. AI agents can now run within the database itself, eliminating data movement risks and ensuring that identity and access controls remain consistent at the database level. Generative Development, Oracle’s new AI-centric infrastructure, enables minimized AI data exposure with Trusted Data APIs and a significant reduction of application risks by restricting LLM inputs and validating outputs. Finally, the company has implemented NIST-approved quantum-resistant algorithms, enabling strong cryptographic agility of the entire platform. Having already led the database vendors in the latest KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on Data Security Platforms, Oracle is clearly aiming to maintain that leadership as security evolves for the age of intelligent data.”
—Alexei Balaganski, CTO and Lead Analyst, KuppingerCole Analysts
“Imagine creating your own agent or even a team of agents to perform tasks. With Oracle AI Database 26ai, customers can do just that using the company’s Oracle Select AI Agent, which provides a framework to build, deploy, and manage custom AI Agents. Developers define agents declaratively using PL/SQL or Python. An agent team could, for example, be used to automate finding solutions to database issues using DB logs. They could fetch logs, analyze the issue, and find a solution using RAG. This agent team could then write a report and post it on Slack. This is just one of the many uses for built-in AI. Oracle Database Engineering’s creativity is truly on display with Oracle AI Database 26ai, separating Oracle from many of its principal competitors in providing customers with a competitive edge.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Vice President & Practice Lead, Data Intelligence, Analytics & Infrastructure The Futurum Group
“With most enterprises storing different data types in different data siloes, the promise of an enterprise-grade AI solution that brings all of a company’s data together to take full advantage of AI remains an ongoing challenge. What’s needed is a true AI database, one that combines the ability to support all data types in a unified architecture—and bring it together with the rapid advances of AI—such as agentic AI, unified vector search, leading LLMs, MCP Server, NL-to-SQL and more. With its latest release, Oracle has done just that, by introducing an AI database that enables organizations to combine all of their private business data with public data and agentic frameworks to rapidly advance their business forward with AI. The enterprise database for the era of AI has a new name—and it’s Oracle AI Database.”
—Ron Westfall, VP, Practice Lead, Networking and Infrastructure, HyperFRAME Research
“In our view, the fastest and safest path to agentic AI for Oracle shops is to bring AI to the data you already govern. Oracle AI Database 26ai embeds key agentic primitives like vectors, RAG, tool use, and multi-step orchestration—directly in the database. This reduces data movement, latency, and risk while keeping policies, lineage, and controls intact. We advise CIOs, CTOs and chief AI officers to validate workload fit and TCO, but for estates running mission-critical Oracle workloads, this is a pragmatic way to pilot and scale AI assistants and teams of agents on harmonized data without rebuilding the entire estate.”
—Dave Vellante, Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer, theCube Research
“Data fragmentation and stale data are two of the greatest barriers to AI adoption. By supporting all data types and unifying transactional, analytic and AI workloads within a single, scalable architecture, Oracle AI Database 26ai provides a clear path for organizations to establish a single version of the truth.”
—David Floyer, CTO, theCUBE Research
“Oracle AI Database 26ai doesn’t bolt AI onto data, it fuses them. That architectural choice is why Oracle now sets the pace for enterprise-grade AI where many rivals still rely on data pipelines, ETL, basically the equivalent of duct tape, which simply doesn’t scale in the AI era. Plus, agentic AI workflows that combine private database context with public data put Oracle in a different league, where production-ready AI meets real-world enterprise scale for business leaders.”
—Stephen Catanzano, Senior Analyst, Omdia
“Today, developers building AI-powered applications are driving technology decisions like never before. Empowering them with frictionless tools is critical to fueling the next wave of innovative, user-centric apps. Oracle AI Database 26ai Free breaks down access barriers, putting advanced AI—which will include in-database AI agents—directly in developers’ hands and enable them to shape the future on their own terms. This move reinforces Oracle’s commitment to the developer community.”
“Oracle AI Database 26ai marks a transformative leap in database technology by embedding AI at its core, enabling seamless integration across diverse data types and workloads. With Agentic AI frameworks, AI-assisted appdev, support for Apache Iceberg, and advanced security measures such as quantum-resistant encryption, Oracle is not only future-proofing data management, but also empowering enterprises to harness AI-driven insights across multicloud and on-premises environments. Oracle AI Database redefines how organizations can securely and efficiently turn data into a strategic asset to accelerate innovation and boost productivity.”
—Richard Winter, CEO, Wintercorp