The motivation behind database modernization has traditionally been greater efficiency and cost savings. Yet, theCUBE Research has also found that there is a larger prize at stake: AI projects built on top of a modernized foundation can generate significant value.

The ultimate goal is to progress beyond a fragmented data estate, which can slow teams down and make governance more difficult. AI projects need to be repeatable and scalable in production, and this will be a central focus of discussion during Oracle AI World in Las Vegas later this month.

“For Oracle customers, the strategic question is becoming: Are we simply reducing infrastructure cost, or are we creating a better platform for repeatable AI execution?” said theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante. “The value is not only in automation, standardization and operational efficiency. The bigger opportunity is using that foundation to get onto the AI learning curve earlier, free skilled teams from routine administration, improve governance consistency and accelerate the development of AI use cases over time. Database modernization is still an IT decision. But, increasingly, it is also an AI readiness decision that impacts all parts of the business.”

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will be covering the latest news and announcements from Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, Oct. 28. The coverage will feature on-site reporting and exclusive interviews with Oracle executives and industry leaders as theCUBE explores how Oracle is integrating agentic AI into enterprise workflows, connecting trusted data with intelligent automation and addressing the infrastructure, security and governance requirements of AI at scale. (* Disclosure below.)

Database modernization to ensure trust

The upcoming Oracle event will offer an opportunity for the company to showcase recent advancements in a number of key product areas. One of these involves the implementation of guardrails and trust.

AI-generated solutions need to be accurate, secure and reliable for enterprises to trust their results. This has become essential as autonomous agents build applications and take actions, according to Juan Loaiza, executive vice president of mission-critical database technologies at Oracle.

“Guardrails don’t cut it. You can’t simply drop AI on top of an architecture that was never designed for these challenges AI brings and expect it to work,” said Loaiza during a pre-event conversation with theCUBE. “What we’re doing is different. We’re ensuring trust across the entire technology stack. The only way we think is possible to build AI solutions that we can trust is to architect the whole thing together — AI, data and AppDev all in one whole.”

Earlier this year, Oracle outlined its three-pronged strategy to address security challenges brought about by the wider use of artificial intelligence. AI systems have created new paths to sensitive enterprise data, and Oracle has implemented a set of tools geared toward database security, patching, testing and lifecycle management.

“There’s so much optimism on AI and how it can improve productivity, but there’s also a lot of concern when it comes to cyberattacks,” said Arpan Shah, senior VP of Oracle Database at Oracle, during a recent interview with theCUBE. “One of the key focus areas for us in Las Vegas is to really show what we’re doing in the product, how we’re designing features to really start at the data layer and go all the way to the app layer to help customers move from AI prototypes to trusted AI apps at scale.”

Enhancements for Lakehouse and AI Database technologies

Another primary area of focus involves intelligent data architecture. Oracle’s Autonomous AI Lakehouse combines the company’s Autonomous Database capabilities with the open table format of Apache Iceberg to deliver an interoperable foundation for analytics that spans every major cloud.

Oracle will be unveiling a number of new capabilities in Autonomous AI Lakehouse, according to Nipun Agarwal, SVP of Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse at Oracle.

“The lakehouse is transforming from being an analytic platform into a decision backbone for enterprise AI,” Agarwal told theCUBE. “What that means is basically that in the past, customers would come to a lakehouse for running their analytic workloads. But, now, lakehouse is the right, appropriate platform both for analytic as well as AI workloads.”

Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database also provides a fully automated, cloud-based data platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage, tune, patch and secure itself. Its multicloud capabilities give enterprises the choice of running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or on Oracle managed services in Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Offering multimodal data management, the database supports transactional and analytical processing while helping standardize and automate database operations.

“We’ll be talking a lot about building and integrating AI agents with Autonomous AI Database at AI world, of course,” said Çetin Özbütün, EVP of Autonomous AI Database technologies at Oracle, during an appearance on theCUBE. “But if you’re only looking at how LLMs interact with enterprise data from an application standpoint, you’re missing a big part of the picture. An often overlooked ingredient is that AI applications need to be built on the right data foundation. And that is where the real strengths of Autonomous AI Database come in.”

New platform capabilities

Oracle’s platform capabilities have been further enhanced this year with the introduction of features such as APEXlang. The human-readable application definition language gives leading coding agents a structured application target while Oracle manages the runtime, security and application lifecycle.

“What APEXlang does is it takes all this configuration or all these properties that you define with a low-code system traditionally through a user interface, but it’s captured in a formal language with a formal grammar and that can be compiled,” said Mike Hichwa, SVP of software development at Oracle, during a recent conversation with theCUBE. “So, you can use a coding agent like Codex or Claude, and you just simply say, ‘Build me an application to do something.’ And it will generate this language.”

Oracle has been gradually extending its high-availability Exadata service to target AI and location-sensitive use cases. However, live migration of database VMs running Remote Direct Memory Access in Exadata has been nearly impossible.

In June, Oracle announced Exadata VM Live Migration, a capability that allows a live Oracle Database to move between hosts while continuing to operate on Exadata. This new feature will be more fully described during Oracle AI World, according to Jia Shi, group vice president of software  development at Oracle, in an interview with theCUBE.

“Before this June, nobody could actually move their database VM running RDMA from one host to another in a live fashion,” Shi said. “So, we are really happy to announce that we finally solved that technical challenge. This is truly unique in the sense that we’re able to launch the capability on Exadata where customers can move their database VM running an active database workload with all the RDMA connections intact from one server to another.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of the Oracle AI World on Oct. 28. Plus, you can access theCUBE’s exclusive content on demand after the event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer various ways for you to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle AI World, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE podcasts

SiliconANGLE’s “theCUBE Pod” is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, which you can enjoy while on the go. During each podcast, SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante discuss the biggest trends in enterprise tech, including AI, cloud, cybersecurity and infrastructure, with context and analysis.

SiliconANGLE also produces our weekly “Breaking Analysis” program, where Vellante examines major developments in enterprise tech, combining insights from theCUBE with spending data from Enterprise Technology Research, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.

Guests

At Oracle AI World on Oct. 28, theCUBE will speak with Oracle leaders and industry executives about integrating agentic AI into enterprise workflows, connecting trusted data with intelligent automation, and addressing the infrastructure, security and governance requirements of AI at scale.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Oracle AI World. Neither Oracle, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE