26ai New Features

The Privilege Gap Oracle DBAs Have Endured for Decades For years, Oracle DBAs faced an uncomfortable choice when managing access control: grant privileges object by object (tedious and brittle) or grant system-wide ANY privileges like SELECT ANY TABLE (dangerously broad). Every time a new table or package was created in a schema, someone had to remember to run

The End of UNION ALL FROM DUAL For decades, Oracle developers have endured one of the most verbose patterns in SQL: inserting multiple rows using SELECT … FROM DUAL UNION ALL. Oracle Database 26ai finally introduces Table Value Constructors – a SQL-standard feature that lets you specify multiple rows of data inline using the VALUES clause. This brings

The End of Y/N and 0/1 Workarounds For decades, Oracle developers have used NUMBER(1) with 0/1 values or VARCHAR2(1) with Y/N flags to represent Boolean logic in database tables. Every team had its own convention, every application its own mapping layer, and every table its own set of CHECK constraints to enforce valid values. Oracle Database 23ai/26ai finally

Introduction For decades, developers have been forced to choose between the structural integrity of relational databases and the flexibility of document-store models. JSON Relational Duality Views in Oracle Database 26ai eliminate this tradeoff entirely. They allow you to access and manipulate fully normalized relational data as nested JSON documents, and vice versa, without any data duplication. Application developers

Why Graph Queries in SQL Matter Many critical business problems — fraud detection, supply chain traceability, social network analysis, impact assessment — are inherently graph problems. Traditionally, solving these in a relational database meant writing painful recursive CTEs, multi-level self-joins, or shipping data to a separate graph database. Oracle AI Database 26ai changes this fundamentally with first-class support

Introduction Oracle 26ai brings a game-changing capability to the database world: native AI Vector Search. With a first-class VECTOR data type, built-in similarity functions, and declarative vector indexing, Oracle eliminates the need for external vector databases like Pinecone, Milvus, or Weaviate. You can now store, index, and query high-dimensional vector embeddings alongside your relational data — all within

What Are SQL Domains? SQL Domains, introduced in Oracle 23ai and enhanced in 26ai, let you define reusable, named data type definitions — complete with constraints, display expressions, ordering logic, and annotations — as first-class schema objects. Instead of scattering identical CHECK constraints across dozens of tables, you define the rule once and reference it everywhere. Think of