After months of speculation, it’s finally official: Oracle has released version 26ai of its Autonomous Database. The new release is already available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), so you can start exploring it right away.
One notable change is in the OCI burger menu—Oracle has renamed the familiar “Oracle Database” section to “Oracle AI Database”, reflecting the AI-driven enhancements in this version.
Let’s jump in and quickly create a brand-new Oracle 26ai instance to see what’s new!
All new features are in the updated docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/autonomous-database/serverless/adbsb/whats-new-adwc.html#GUID-F31A86F8-012B-4235-A0BE-4ABF75164853
Create Autonomous Database
Do you see the blue announcement? It’s AI World time now!
Choose Workload Type
Data Warehouse, aka ADW, is now Lakehouse.
Choose your Edition
Free and Developer versions are available too.
Set Credentials and Network Access Type
In this example, I use public network access.
Set Contacts and other Settings if required – Create
ADB is ready
After a short period of provisioning, download the connection wallet and setup your SQL*Plus connect, as example in VS Code.
Connect
Example from VS Code. Don’t worry if you see version 23.00 in v$version – this is the same behavior as explained in new features list for REST API calls: Oracle Autonomous AI Database 26ai replaces Oracle Autonomous Database 23ai. As a result, you can continue to use CreateAutonomousDatabase with 23ai for dbVersion. The REST API returns 23ai, but you will see 26ai in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) console.
