Oracle has been quietly building one of its most feature-rich database releases in years. Oracle Database 23ai — originally named 23c before Oracle leaned fully into the AI branding — landed in May 2024 and brought over 300 new features to the platform. But if you’re a SQL developer or DBA, the SQL side of this release deserves special attention.
For years, Oracle SQL lagged behind competitors in developer ergonomics. PostgreSQL was shipping quality-of-life improvements. MySQL was adding modern syntax. And Oracle, frankly, was slow to evolve the SQL language itself — even when its own community was asking for changes.
23ai changes that narrative.
In this series, I’ll break down the SQL innovations in Oracle 23ai one by one, every week throughout 2025. Some of these features are pure developer convenience. Others are architectural game-changers. A few of them — and I’ll get to this in September — have a personal story attached.
Here’s a preview of what we’ll cover:
- Boolean data type — finally a native
BOOLEANin SQL tables - IF [NOT] EXISTS for DDL — write safer migration scripts
- GROUP BY ALL — stop repeating every non-aggregated column
- Annotations — add metadata to any database object
- SQL Domains — reusable column type definitions
- Direct JOINs in UPDATE and DELETE — simplify DML logic
- SELECT without FROM — a small but elegant change
- AI Vector Search — a new data type for the AI era
- SQL/PGQ Property Graphs — graph queries in standard SQL
And much more. Whether you’re running Oracle on-premises or in OCI, these features are worth knowing. Some are already available in Oracle Database Free (the successor to XE), so you can start experimenting right now.
Welcome to 2025. Let’s make it an Oracle SQL year.
