By byBrian Beeler
Publication Date: 2026-10-29 18:46:00
The biggest AI infrastructure decision many enterprises make in the next year won’t be a GPU investment; it will be a database upgrade. Oracle AI Database 26ai is the long-term support release Oracle is steering its 19c installed base toward. 26ai puts vector search in the same engine that holds transactions. When the vector index lives in the database, the block array and the SAN fabric behind it become AI infrastructure, carrying retrieval traffic alongside the transactions they already serve.
The Database Changed Underneath AI
Oracle built 26ai around that idea: a native VECTOR data type, SQL vector search functions, in-database model execution through ONNX, and SELECT AI for natural language queries, all in an LTS release the company enumerates at more than 300 new features. In practice, a DBA can generate embeddings, store them next to the rows they describe, and run a similarity search within the same transaction scope as an order lookup. There’s no separate vector…
