As 2025 closes, let’s make some educated guesses about where Oracle is heading in 2026.
More AI, deeper in the database: Oracle’s Vector AI Search is a foundation. In 2026, expect Oracle to ship tighter integrations with popular AI frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex), more built-in embedding models that run inside the database, and potentially an on-premises Select AI option that doesn’t require an external LLM API call.
Oracle Database 23ai on-premises maturity: The cloud version of 23ai has been available since May 2024. The on-premises version followed, but enterprise adoption takes time. 2026 will be the year most large Oracle shops begin serious evaluation for on-premises 23ai upgrades. Expect more migration tooling and upgrade advisory content from Oracle.
SQL/PGQ expansion: The ANSI SQL/PGQ standard is still young. Oracle was early to implement it, but the standard itself will evolve. Expect Oracle to track those changes, potentially adding recursive graph pattern matching and more sophisticated path expressions.
True Cache GA and wider adoption: True Cache, introduced in 23ai, will mature in 2026 with better monitoring, automatic cache sizing, and potentially multi-node True Cache configurations for horizontal read scaling.
Kafka API evolution: The Kafka-compatible TxEventQ API will likely gain Kafka Schema Registry compatibility and better tooling for migrating existing Kafka topics to Oracle TxEventQ.
On this blog: We’ll keep the weekly cadence going. Week by week, feature by feature. Oracle has given us a lot to work with. 2026 should be a good year.
See you in January.
