Oracle AI Vector Search

Easily bring AI-powered similarity search to your business data without managing and integrating multiple databases or compromising functionality, security, and consistency. AI Vector Search enables searching both structured and unstructured data by semantics or meaning, and by values, enabling ultra-sophisticated AI search applications. Native AI vector search capabilities can also help large language models (LLMs) deliver more accurate and contextually relevant results for enterprise use cases using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on your business data.

Oracle Vector Search: Powering the Modern Enterprise (2:43)
Announcing generative development (GenDev) for enterprise

Watch the replay of EVP Juan Loaiza’s Oracle CloudWorld keynote to learn about this groundbreaking, AI-centric AppDev infrastructure.

  • The simplicity of a single converged database

    Easily combine similarity search with relational, text, JSON, spatial, and graph data types to enhance your apps—all in a single database. Bring AI to your data – don’t move your data for AI.

  • Converse in natural language with your business data

    Enable natural language search across your private business data using RAG to guide the LLM of your choice better and steer it away from hallucinations.

  • Develop AI apps your way

    Use your favorite development tools, AI frameworks, AI models, and programming languages to build AI apps how you want.

  • AI built for the enterprise

    Build mission-critical AI apps with ease. Leverage industrial-strength capabilities to achieve scalability, performance, high availability, and security.

  • Full generative AI pipeline capabilities at your fingertips

    Oracle AI Vector Search capabilities include document load, transformation, chunking, embedding, similarity search, and RAG with LLMs is available natively or through APIs within the database.

Bring AI to your business data: Similarity search made simple

“We are happy to see AI Vector Search added to Oracle Database. We appreciate that we can run AI Vector Search in the same Oracle Database as our other workloads, which allows us to provide a reliable and secure solution.”

Shinichiro Otsuka NRI Certified IT Architect, Nomura Research Institute, Ltd.

Key features of Oracle AI Vector Search

VECTOR data type

Use the new native VECTOR data type to store vectors directly within tables in Oracle Database 23ai. Support vectors with different dimension counts and formats to suit any vector embedding model of your choice to simplify application development and deployment.

Flexible vector generation

Import open source embedding models of your choice using the ONNX framework and use them to generate vectors for your data. Alternatively, use database APIs to generate vectors from your preferred embedding model provider. or optionally import vectors directly into the database.

Vector indexes

Accelerate similarity searches using highly accurate approximate search indexes (vector indexes), such as the in-memory neighbor graph index for maximum performance and neighbor partition indexes for massive data sets.

Simple standard SQL for querying vectors

Use simple, intuitive SQL to perform similarity search on vectors and freely combine vectors with relational, text, JSON, and other data types within the same query.

Simple search accuracy specification

Take complete control of the search accuracy your application requires by specifying the target accuracy as a simple percentage. Define default accuracy during index creation and override in search queries, if needed.

Exadata optimizations

Accelerate vector index creation and search with Exadata System Software 24ai optimizations. Gain the high performance, scale, and availability Exadata provides to enterprise databases.

Oracle AI Vector Search use cases

RAG uses the results of similarity search to improve the accuracy and contextual relevance of large language model responses to questions about business data. RAG helps identify contextually relevant private data that the LLM may not have been trained on and then uses it to augment user prompts so LLMs can respond with greater accuracy.

The desire to get higher quality answers from LLMs is universal, spanning many industries. Some examples of using RAG for improved accuracy include the following:

  • Chatbots for internal and external users
  • Document searches and summaries
  • Language to code synthesis
  • Answers to questions that require specialized, domain-specific knowledge

RAG helps organizations provide customized answers to business questions without the high cost of retraining or fine-tuning the LLMs.

Retrieval augmented generation diagram, description below
  1. A chatbot enables a dialog with an LLM.
  2. Run similarity search on your private business data and pass those facts to the LLM.
  3. The results are formatted as a prompt and context for the LLM.
  4. The LMM receives up to date business data inputs thereby reducing hallucinations.
  5. The high-quality responses are returned to the chatbot.


September 10, 2024

Using NVIDIA GPUs to Accelerate AI Vector Search in Oracle Database 23ai

Tirthankar Lahiri, Senior Vice President, Mission-Critical Data and AI Engines
Shasank Chavan, Vice President, Data, In-Memory and AI Technologies
Weiwei Gong, Senior Director, Vector Flow Analytics

At Oracle CloudWorld 2024, we are demonstrating two GPU-accelerated capabilities for Oracle Database that utilize NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate AI Vector Search functionality in Oracle Database 23ai. The first capability is the GPU-accelerated creation of vector embeddings from a variety of different input data sets, such as text, images, and videos. The second is an early-stage proof of concept that illustrates how GPUs can be used to accelerate vector index creation and maintenance within Oracle Database.

Read the complete post

Get started with Oracle AI Vector Search

Try 20+ Always Free cloud services, with a 30-day trial for even more

Oracle offers a Free Tier with no time limits on more than 20 services such as Autonomous Database, Arm Compute, and Storage, as well as US$300 in free credits to try additional cloud services. Get the details and sign up for your free account today.

  • What’s included with Oracle Cloud Free Tier?

    • 2 Autonomous Databases, 20 GB each
    • AMD and Arm Compute VMs
    • 200 GB total block storage
    • 10 GB object storage
    • 10 TB outbound data transfer per month
    • 10+ more Always Free services
    • US$300 in free credits for 30 days for even more

Learn more about AI Vector Search

With AI Vector Search in Oracle Database 23ai, organizations can combine semantic search of their business data with relational queries inside the same database.

Contact sales

Interested in learning more about Oracle AI Vector Search? Let one of our experts help.

  • They can answer questions like:

    • How can Oracle AI Vector search help my business?
    • How can I leverage OCI to run my Oracle Database workloads?
    • How can I get the most out of my Oracle investments?