Oracle Database 23ai: First Impressions

Oracle 23ai (formerly known as Oracle 23c) is the next long-term release of the Oracle Database. Beginning of May 2024, the general availability was announced. Although the software is not available yet for all platforms, it is worth to look at the new features.

The Long Way to Oracle 23ai

Keynote of Gerald Venzl at DOAG 2022 (Photo: Martin Berger)

We are waiting now for quite a while for the newest long-term release of the Oracle database. A brief recap (from a personal perspective):

• At the Kscope conference 2022 in Dallas, Connor McDonald surprisingly made a few announcements at the end of a presentation about what will be included in Oracle’s next database release. For example, that there will be a BOOLEAN data type and that “FROM DUAL” will no longer be necessary.
• A few months later, at the DOAG conference in Nuremberg, Gerald Venzl held a keynote about Oracle 23c, which will be the next Oracle Database version. He announced many features for developers and motivated the audience to take part of the 23c Beta program. Philipp Salvisberg documented some of the highlights of this keynote in a Twitter thread (in these old days, when “Oracle 23ai” was still called “Oracle 23c”, “X” was still called “Twitter”).
• Starting in November 2022, I had the opportunity to take part in the Oracle 23c Beta program. The cool thing about it is that you can try out new features at a very early stage. What’s less cool, of course, is that you’re not allowed to talk or write about it. For a few months, I played around with several SQL enhancements.
• Then, in April 2023, there was a rather surprising announcement. I remember being a speaker at a SOUG Day that day when the rumour spread among the participants that Oracle 23c was now available. It then quickly became clear that the long-term release is not yet available, but rather an “Oracle Database 23c Free Developer Release”, which is being made available to the developer community free of charge for experimentation. Since that day, I only used this version of 23c.
• For more than a year, we were waiting for the production release of Oracle Database 23c. And then…
• …on on 2 May 2024, Larry Ellison and Juan Loaiza officially announced Oracle 23ai as the next long-term release of the Oracle database. What?! The last-minute name change was somewhat surprising, but in terms of content, Oracle 23ai is just the newest version 23.4 of the already announced database release.

Installing a 23ai Playground

Although Oracle 23ai is not available yet for production systems, there are multiple opportunities to play around with the new version of the Oracle database. The free developer release can be downloaded a Docker container, Oracle VM Virtual Box or RPM packages for Linux from the Oracle Database Free website.

I decided to install a Docker image from Gerald Venzl’s GitHub repository. With the few commands described in the “Quick Start” section of the README file, I was able to setup a “23ai playground” within a couple of minutes.

On OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), 23ai is also available, but not yet in all regions. In my OCI home region “Switzerland North (Zurich)”, it is still not possible to create an Autonomous Database with version 23ai, but an Oracle Base Database in a virtual machine can be created with database version 23ai. Because I already had a VM with Oracle 23c (version 23.3), I upgraded the existing database to 23ai (version 23.4).

Now, I am ready to use my “playground” on OCI and Docker to play around with the numerous new features of Oracle 23ai.

Many New Features

I work with Oracle databases since years (my first version was Oracle 6.0.33), but I can’t remember a release that introduced so many new features as Oracle 23c/23ai. Especially for developers, there are a lot of good news. When you look into the table of contents fo the Oracle Database New Features 23ai documentation, you can find a bunch of enhancements and completely new topics that were introduced. But that’s not all. For most of the Oracle customers that still work with version 19c, even the features of Oracle 21c are still new. I usually use the Features and Licensing app that allows to search for specific topics. It shows for each feature in which version and license it is available. The app is a good starting point to get an overview of the features that might be interesting for you.

What are the most important features? I think that is an individual choice, depending of particular needs. Often mentioned are AI Vector Search, JSON Relational Duality Views, Property Graphs in SQL and the Multilingual Engine (MLE) that allows to use JavaScript in the database. The idea behind all these enhancements is that you don’t need a specific database product from a different vendor for each type of workload. Instead, different technologies can be used in one database. Oracle calls this “Converged Database”. Let’s see how customers will accept this idea.

Apart from that, there are various minor and major improvements in SQL. I have become so familiar with some of them that I already find it difficult to work with customer databases on Oracle 19c. I hope that the on-prem software for Oracle Database 23ai will be available soon and many customers will upgrade to this long-term release in the next few months.