For Oracle executives, much of the focus of this year’s Oracle CloudWorld event was – unsurprisingly – cloud computing, from the ongoing adoption by enterprises of multi-cloud strategies to partnerships with the world’s largest cloud infrastructure services providers.
But just as predominant was AI, with the IT giant expanding the capabilities of the fast-emerging technology in everything from data storage to software development to cloud computing security. In their keynote addresses at the show in Las Vegas, both Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Larry Ellison, the company’s chairman and CTO, spoke about the central role AI will increasingly play throughout the product and services portfolio.
“As we continue to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, one thing is clear: AI has the potential to transform organizations and industries in profound ways,” Sherry Taio, senior manager of generative AI and analytics at Oracle, wrote in a blog post. “However, to truly harness the power of AI, you need more than just aspirational ideas – you need real-world, production-grade solutions that you can integrate into your daily operations.”
OCI Agents in the Works
At Oracle CloudWorld, the company introduced Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) generative AI agents, with a key one focused on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities, which enable organizations to incorporate their corporate data into training of AI models and make them more specific to their needs. The RAG Agent is designed to automate some of the manual processes, including agent planning, retrieval and generation, making it easier for users to get started. It also reduces hallucinations.
OCI GenAI Agents also let organizations access Oracle Database 23ai – which was introduced in May and infuses AI capabilities to enterprise data and applications – and its AI Vector Search to search for documents, images and relational data stored in databases based on conceptual content.
“With the OCI Generative AI Agents service, Oracle Database 23ai customers on OCI can subscribe to a fully managed RAG service that enables them to talk to their data,” Greg Pavlik, executive vice president of AI and data management services for OCI, said in a statement. “It’s AI designed for companies looking to put AI into their real-world production environments quickly – by bringing AI to their data.”
Other agents being developed will touch on insights, productivity and efficiency, according to Taio. In alpha are SQL Agent for enabling natural language to SQL generation, and others for Oracle Cloud Console to deliver natural language to advanced resource search and to billing inquiries.
Llama Support in OCI
Oracle also is broadening its OCI Generative AI, making Meta’s latest Llama 3.1 open large language models (LLMs) available in the managed service. Two of the LLMs – the 70 billion and 405 billion parameter models – will be available, enabling organizations to run them as a service without having to manage containers or infrastructure.
In addition, the company looked to bring generative AI to developers, with some of the focus being on Oracle Database 23ai.
“Just as paved roads had to be built for us to get the full benefit of cars, we have to change the application development infrastructure to get the full benefit of AI app generation,” Juan Loaiza, executive vice president of mission-critical database technologies for Oracle, said in a statement. “GenDev enables developers to harness AI to swiftly generate modular, evolvable enterprise applications that are understandable and safe. Users can interact with data and applications using natural language and find data based on its semantic content.”
Generative AI to Developers
The company unveiled GenDev (generative development) for enterprises, an AI-centric application development infrastructure that leverages tools in Oracle Database 23ai – including JSON Relational Duality Views, AI Vector Search and APEX low-code development platform – that makes it easier to more quickly create sophisticated applications that can use natural language interfaces and human-centric data.
Developers also will see wider support for LLMs with integration from Oracle Autonomous Database, including Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and Hugging Face. In all, Autonomous Database integrates with 35 LLMs from seven providers to offer a broad selection when building GenDev applications.
Oracle also said that Oracle Code Assist, which is optimized for Java and accelerates developers’ work by using generative AI to help write code and build services, is now in beta.
Security and Databases Get AI Features
Ellison talked about using AI to enhance security of networks and applications within OCI, introducing Oracle Gen2 Cloud Network + ZPR Software, with ZPR standing for zero trust packet routing. He said expanding the use of AI to drive greater automation will strengthen security in various parts of the network, adding that using biometrics will help organizations move past passwords for authentication.
Next year, Oracle plans to put its Oracle Intelligent Data Lake into limited availability, part of the vendor’s larger Data Intelligence Platform. The Intelligent Data Lake pulls together orchestration, data warehouses, analytics and AI in the Data Intelligence Platform, which is powered by OCI.
More generative AI and multi-cloud capabilities are coming to Heatwave, a cloud-native and fully managed service built on MySQL Enterprise Edition that lets enterprises leverage generative AI in both OCI and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new features will let users more quickly and securely implement lakehouse and machine learning applications.
“To enable more customers to take advantage of our innovations, including HeatWave GenAI with in-database LLMs, we are making them available natively on AWS,” Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, said in a statement. “This enables AWS users to build rich generative AI applications without the need for AI expertise, without complex manual integrations and troubleshooting, and without the security risks and costs of moving their data to separate services.”
