Oracle AI Database 25ai incorporates artificial intelligence capabilities into the core database engine and supports deployment across cloud and on-premises environments, with on-premises general availability in 2026. The release enables AI-driven applications to operate directly on enterprise data within the database, embedding AI functionality within the database layer. For some database releases, Oracle also provides an Express Edition (XE) that is free to use. Oracle AI Database release numbering has used the following codes: The Introduction to Oracle AI Database includes a brief history on some of the key innovations introduced with each major release of Oracle AI Database. See My Oracle Support (MOS) note
Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1) for the current Oracle AI Database releases and their patching end dates.
Patch updates and security alerts Prior to Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation released Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) and Security Patch Updates (SPUs) and Security Alerts to close security vulnerabilities. These releases are issued quarterly; some of these releases have updates issued prior to the next quarterly release. Starting with Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation releases Release Updates (RUs) and Release Update Revisions (RURs). RUs usually contain security, regression (bug), optimizer, and functional fixes which may include feature extensions as well. RURs include all fixes from their corresponding RU but only add new security and regression fixes. However, no new optimizer or functional fixes are included.
Competition In the market for relational databases, Oracle AI Database competes against commercial products such as
IBM Db2 and
Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle and IBM tend to battle for the mid-range database market on Unix and Linux platforms, while Microsoft dominates the mid-range database market on
Microsoft Windows platforms. However, since they share many of the same customers, Oracle and IBM tend to support each other's products in many middleware and application categories (for example:
WebSphere,
PeopleSoft, and
Siebel Systems CRM), and IBM's hardware divisions work closely with Oracle on performance-optimizing server-technologies (for example,
Linux on IBM Z). Niche commercial competitors include
Teradata (in data warehousing and business intelligence), Software AG's
ADABAS,
Sybase, and IBM's
Informix, among many others. In the cloud, Oracle AI Database competes against the database services of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Increasingly, the Oracle AI Database products compete against
open-source software relational and non-relational database systems such as
PostgreSQL,
MongoDB,
Couchbase,
Neo4j,
ArangoDB and others. Oracle acquired
Innobase, supplier of the
InnoDB codebase to
MySQL, in part to compete better against open source alternatives, and acquired
Sun Microsystems, owner of MySQL, in 2010. Database products licensed as open-source are, by the legal terms of the
Open Source Definition, free to distribute and free of royalty or other licensing fees. ==Reception==