Oracle Unveils AI Database 26ai and Autonomous AI Lakehouse to Power Next-Gen AI Workloads

Oracle Corporation has announced the general availability of Oracle AI Database 26ai and Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse at its flagship event, Oracle AI World 2025 in Las Vegas. This marks a major step in integrating artificial intelligence directly into its core data platforms across cloud and on-premises environments.

The Oracle AI Database 26ai, a long-term support release replacing Oracle Database 23ai, embeds AI capabilities directly within the database engine—eliminating the need for external data movement or third-party tools.

"By architecting AI and data together, Oracle AI Database makes 'AI for Data' simple to learn and simple to use," said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Oracle Database Technologies, Oracle. "We enable our customers to easily deliver trusted AI insights, innovations, and productivity for all their data, everywhere, including both operational systems and analytic data lakes."

Key features include AI vector search, Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, and an AI agent framework for building and deploying intelligent agents natively within the database.

The platform supports popular tools such as ONNX, open agent frameworks, large language models, and is compatible with Apache Iceberg for data lakes.

Security upgrades include quantum-safe encryption for data-at-rest and in-flight, while Oracle Exadata for AI provides hardware acceleration for demanding workloads. Developers gain access to AI Private Agent Factory, a no-code AI agent builder, and natural language application development within Oracle APEX.

Alongside the database, Oracle introduced the Autonomous AI Lakehouse, a unified analytics and AI platform integrating Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database with Apache Iceberg.

"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," said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst, Constellation Research.

"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," Mueller added.

Available across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Exadata Cloud@Customer, it supports tools like Databricks, Snowflake, and AWS Glue, enabling seamless analytics and AI operations without data migration.

Notable features include AI vector search on Iceberg tables, property graph analytics, Select AI for natural language-to-SQL conversion, and a Data Lake Accelerator that dynamically scales compute based on demand.

"With Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse, we are offering customers a lakehouse platform without compromise by combining the highly trusted and industry-hardened Autonomous AI Database—executing in excess of 48 billion queries per hour—with the openness of Apache Iceberg," said Çetin Özbütün, executive vice president, Autonomous Database Technologies, Oracle.

"Not only is Oracle breaking down the data silos between analytic systems with Iceberg, we are also enabling customers to access Iceberg data in any platform—operational or analytic—in the cloud or on-premises," he added.

Both products are available now, with Oracle offering existing 23ai users free upgrades and AI Vector Search at no extra cost.

"Databricks is committed to open and interoperable data access for analytics and AI, and Unity Catalog helps make that possible by providing a unified governance layer for formats like Apache Iceberg. We welcome Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse's integration with Unity Catalog, giving joint customers seamless access to their data and the flexibility to use Oracle and Databricks together," said Stephen Orban, senior vice president, Product Ecosystem & Partnerships, Databricks.