Oracle Database

What is Oracle Database?

Oracle Database stores and manages data for systems that cannot afford to lose a transaction, such as bank ledgers, telecom billing platforms, airline reservations and government records. It is a relational database queried with SQL and extended with PL/SQL, Oracle’s procedural language for stored procedures, functions and triggers. Over the decades Oracle has added native support for JSON documents, XML, graphs, spatial data, text search and vector embeddings, and it describes the result as a converged database: one engine that handles many data types and workloads instead of a separate specialized system for each.

Much of its hold on large enterprises comes from features for scale and uptime. Real Application Clusters let several servers run one database at the same time, Data Guard keeps synchronized standby copies ready for failover, and multiversion read consistency lets long reports read data without blocking updates. Since the 12c release in 2013, a multitenant architecture has let many pluggable databases share a single container database, which simplifies consolidation and patching.

The product is now marketed as Oracle AI Database. Its current long-term support release, Oracle AI Database 26ai, arrived in October 2025 as the successor to 23ai and includes AI Vector Search for similarity queries, Select AI for asking questions in natural language and tools for building AI agents that work directly with database records. Customers can run it on their own servers, on Oracle Exadata systems, as the managed Autonomous AI Database on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or inside Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services data centers.

Key features of Oracle Database

1. 01

   Real Application Clusters

   RAC runs a single database across multiple clustered servers that share storage, so applications keep working if one server fails and capacity can grow by adding nodes. Oracle introduced it with Oracle9i in 2001.

2. 02

   Data Guard and GoldenGate

   Data Guard maintains standby databases for disaster recovery, and Active Data Guard lets those standbys serve read-only queries. GoldenGate replicates changes in real time to other Oracle or non-Oracle databases.

3. 03

   Converged data models

   One engine stores relational tables alongside JSON documents, XML, graph, spatial and vector data. JSON Relational Duality, added in 23ai, lets applications read and write the same data either as tables or as documents.

4. 04

   AI Vector Search

   A native vector data type, vector indexes and SQL operators support similarity searches over embeddings, so retrieval-augmented AI applications can combine language models with private business data without copying it to a separate vector store.

5. 05

   Autonomous AI Database

   The managed cloud version automates provisioning, tuning, patching, backups and scaling, with variants for transaction processing, data warehousing, JSON workloads and lakehouse analytics on Apache Iceberg tables.

6. 06

   Security controls

   Transparent Data Encryption, Database Vault, Virtual Private Database row-level policies, data redaction and SQL Firewall help restrict access to sensitive data and block unauthorized or injected SQL statements.

7. 07

   Exadata engineered systems

   Exadata pairs database servers with storage servers that filter data before returning it, a technique called Smart Scan. It is available on premises, as Cloud@Customer and as a service in OCI and partner clouds.

8. 08

   PL/SQL and APEX

   PL/SQL adds procedural logic such as loops, exception handling and packages to SQL, while Oracle APEX, a low-code tool included with the database, lets developers build web applications directly on their data.

Who uses Oracle Database?

• Banks and payment processors run core ledgers and card transaction systems that require high availability, strict consistency and detailed audit trails.
• Large enterprises use it as the database behind packaged applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and many older SAP ERP installations.
• Telecom operators and government agencies keep billing, tax and citizen records in clustered databases designed to stay online through hardware failures.
• Development teams add vector search to existing Oracle databases to build AI assistants that answer questions using company data.
• Companies moving to the public cloud shift Oracle workloads to Autonomous AI Database or to Oracle Database@Azure, @Google Cloud or @AWS while keeping their existing SQL and PL/SQL code.

History of Oracle Database

The first Oracle database shipped in 1979 from a small Santa Clara company then called Relational Software. Its founders had studied Edgar F. Codd’s papers on the relational model and aimed for compatibility with System R, an IBM research prototype. They named the product after a CIA-funded project Larry Ellison had worked on at Ampex and sold it as Version 2; a Version 1, written in assembly language in 1978, was never officially released.

Version 3, released in 1983, was rewritten in the C language so it could run on many kinds of computers, and later versions added row-level locking, PL/SQL, stored procedures and clustering. Release names tracked the technology trends of each era, from 8i for the internet and 10g for grid computing to 12c for the cloud in 2013. Oracle renamed its 23c release 23ai in 2024 to highlight vector search, and in October 2025 it introduced Oracle AI Database 26ai along with a new name for the whole product.

1. 1979

   Relational Software ships Oracle Version 2, one of the first commercially available SQL databases.

2. 1983

   Oracle Version 3 is rewritten in C so the database can run on many types of hardware.

3. 2001

   Oracle9i introduces Real Application Clusters for running one database across several servers.

4. 2008

   Oracle introduces Exadata, a database machine that combines servers with intelligent storage.

5. 2013

   Oracle Database 12c adds a multitenant architecture built on pluggable databases.

6. 2018

   The first Oracle Autonomous Database services become available in Oracle’s cloud.

7. 2025

   Oracle AI Database 26ai replaces Oracle Database 23ai as the long-term support release.

Oracle Database pricing

Oracle Database alternatives

Profiled on SoftwareLore:

Also considerMicrosoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora

Oracle Database: frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Oracle AI Database 26ai powers the AI for Data revolution, Oracle oracle.com
2. Oracle AI Database Free, Oracle oracle.com
3. Oracle Database, Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org

Last reviewed September 17, 2026. Spotted an error? Send a correction.