Oracle said it was adding to Oracle Database 23c a native Vector datatype and"optimized" vector similarity search indexing in a move designed to improve performance. New SQL functions and operators are designed to make it easier to create, manipulate, and query vectors in combination with other data models already supported in Oracle Database, including JSON, spatial, and graph data.
The features are included in Oracle Database 23c as an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure database service. Releases are planned for Oracle Database On-premises, Exadata, Exadata Database Service, Exadata Cloud@Customer, and Autonomous Database . "Oracle has deeper features than many of the databases mentioned above so they have more ways to combine and leverage Vector search across the product," he said.
"Both approaches are being used today for building Generative AI applications over business data. There will be a set of users and applications where it's best to keep the embeddings in the same database as the source data. While that won't be 100 percent of Generative AI applications, if it's convenient enough and powerful enough, it will be part of many Oracle customers data management strategy," Rosenbaum said.