Let’s start with the good news!!!
Oracle AI Database 26ai Enterprise Edition for Linux x86‑64 is available on-premises.
With the on-premises release of Oracle 26ai RAC, Oracle raises the standard once again, enabling organizations to simplify operations and maximize availability and performance on cloud and on-premises, continuing the tradition for over two decades of delivering industry-leading performance, scalability, and availability to the world’s most critical workloads.
1. Breakthrough Performance and Scalability
Oracle RAC 26ai builds on a proven foundation and elevates it with features designed for modern, data-driven environments. Notably, performance gains are even more pronounced on engineered systems like Oracle Exadata, where workloads scale almost linearly as more RAC instances are added, whether those workloads are traditional OLTP, real-time analytics, or mixed workloads, as shown below.
Including Vector Search workloads, as showcased by the linear scaling achieved for Vector workloads such as the popular GloVe-25 word embedding dataset. The GloVe-25 dataset contains pre-trained, 25-dimensional word vectors generated using the GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation) algorithm. Each entry maps a single English word to a compact numerical representation based on semantic similarity. Oracle RAC 26ai scales the GloVe-25 workload linearly across all the instances.
Oracle 26ai RAC features, such as Smart Connection Rebalance improves performance of high-contention workloads by dynamically evaluating workloads and relocating sessions with similar access patterns to the same instance, reducing latency and improving efficiency without manual intervention. The Smart Connection Rebalance recommendation engine section in AWR helps identify workloads that can benefit from Smart Connection Rebalance.
2. Zero-Downtime Operations during Maintenance and Updates
Oracle RAC 26ai keeps your systems available, even during patching, with features such as the Two-Stage Rolling Patching process and Oracle RAC local rolling database maintenance.
Oracle 26ai RAC Two-Stage Rolling Patching feature enables certain previously “non-rolling” patches to be applied in a rolling fashion by separating patch application from patch activation. Similarly, Oracle 26ai RAC local rolling database maintenance feature automatically creates an instance on the same host and seamlessly relocates sessions to the new instance on the same host, reducing the network and CPU overhead of session relocation. Both these features work seamlessly with existing tools like FPP (Fleet Patching and Provisioning), OpatchAuto, and Opatch.
3. Cutting-Edge AI Support: Distributed Vector Search at Scale
Modern enterprises increasingly demand AI-powered search and analytical workloads on business-critical data without impacting ongoing business transactions. Using Oracle RAC services, these CPU and memory-intensive AI workloads can be isolated to specific RAC instances, ensuring no impact to ongoing business transactions. Additionally,fast in-memory vector indexes, such as HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World)
indexes enables high-performance, distributed semantic search, at scale and in real time. Vector indexes are managed intelligently in RAC clusters, as shown in the image on the left. When a new index is created, the creating instance stores a checkpoint on disk, allowing other nodes to rapidly duplicate the in-memory index structure. This ensures all the instances of Oracle RAC can participate concurrently in vector search, benefiting from both intra-node and inter-node parallelization. Whether running OLTP, analytics, or AI vector search, RAC’s architecture supports real-time insights without disrupting ongoing operations.
4. Enterprise-Grade Resilience and Multicloud Flexibility
Oracle RAC 26ai provides bounded and predictable recovery times during unplanned outages with fast resumption of activity and dramatically reduced brownout time, as shown below on-premises, but also
extends support to multicloud deployments on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform without any application changes. Oracle 26ai resumes work up to 6x times faster than 19c and completes recovery in 3/4 of the time taken by Oracle 19c, as shown above. 
Conclusion
Oracle RAC 26ai is an ideal choice for organizations looking to deploy enterprise and AI data in scalable, high availability environments. Its unique capabilities deliver seamless patching, dynamic workload optimization, and native support for vector search, positioning Oracle RAC 26ai as a platform that meets today’s needs and scales confidently for future demands.