Oracle has always been a dinosaur, too uptight, and enterprise-focused.
But now they are killing it with AI, and their 26ai version is light-years ahead of anything else.
I spent a day with the @OracleDevs team looking into everything they are shipping. They flew me there (thanks!), but they aren't paying me to say this.
Some of the things that impressed me the most:
1. You can run an LLM and an Embedding model directly from your database. This is huge because you don't need to send your data anywhere else.
2. You can now run hybrid vector searches: semantic and keyword searches directly in the database.
3. There's a new concept called JSON Relational Duality views where you can see your data in both JSON or relational form. It's cool because you can stick to a relational model but take advantage of the flexibility of JSON.
4. They built-in code generation tools you can use to write SQL code on your database.
These are just the ones I remember from the top of my head.
All of these features are in the new version of Oracle.
