Oracle is taking distributed databases mainstream—with global scale and AI in mind.
The company has officially launched the Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure, a powerful new service aimed at simplifying the deployment of high-performance, mission-critical applications across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions worldwide.
Designed for the AI era, the service brings together serverless elasticity, active-active availability, and automated data residency compliance, making it a robust foundation for everything from financial transactions to agentic AI workloads.
Built for the Modern Enterprise—AI Included
In a world where real-time responsiveness is everything, Oracle’s latest offering isn’t just another database—it’s a globally distributed, fault-tolerant architecture built for extreme performance and resilience.
By automatically distributing, storing, and syncing data across multiple OCI regions, this service ensures applications stay online—even during regional outages. This capability is especially vital for industries that require continuous uptime, like e-commerce, stock trading, payments, and telecommunications.
PayPal is already planning to adopt the platform to support its growing global operations. “We look forward to using Oracle’s always-on, serverless architecture with built-in Raft replication,” said Akash Guha, director of database engineering at PayPal. “It’ll accelerate responses, enable greater resilience, and lower costs.”
Agentic AI? Oracle’s Ready for It
The launch comes at a time when agentic AI workloads—AI systems that autonomously initiate and complete tasks—are surging in popularity. These systems demand petabyte-scale processing, millisecond response times, and always-on databases that can handle both structured queries and vector-based operations.
Oracle’s new database service promises to deliver on all fronts:
- Vector and streaming data at scale: Ideal for real-time image recognition, manufacturing, marketing, and predictive analytics
- Elastic OLTP performance: Capable of handling millions of transactions per second
- Zero data loss failover: Thanks to Raft replication and active/active/active design
- Data residency compliance: With automated policies to control where data is stored and processed
- User proximity optimization: By locating data close to users for better app responsiveness
In short, it’s a hyperscale infrastructure tuned for both legacy enterprise systems and bleeding-edge AI.
Oracle’s Serverless Bet
Under the hood, the platform’s serverless architecture is a game-changer. It lets customers dynamically scale resources up or down based on demand—without needing to touch the underlying infrastructure. That means lower operational costs, no over-provisioning, and minimal manual overhead.
Wei Hu, SVP of High Availability Technologies at Oracle, said it plainly: “Customers of all sizes can meet their diverse requirements at a low cost. Today, we’re providing a mission-critical distributed database to the masses.”
That message resonates in a market where most enterprises struggle to stitch together complex, distributed systems using high-maintenance open-source components or patchwork solutions from hyperscalers.
Competitive Context: Oracle vs the World
Oracle isn’t the only tech giant pushing into globally distributed databases. Google Cloud’s Spanner, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, and AWS Aurora Global Databases all compete in the same arena. But Oracle is banking on deep integration with enterprise-grade SQL, agentic AI support, and its proven Exadata performance pedigree to stand out.
While those competitors may win on developer-first tooling, Oracle is going hard after enterprises with critical systems that can’t afford downtime, data loss, or lag—especially in regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, and defense.
Constellation Research’s Holger Mueller put it succinctly:
“With this service from Oracle, CIOs can confidently deploy agentic AI and mission-critical applications globally and meet local data residency requirements.”
No Rewrites Needed
One of the most practical benefits of Oracle’s new service is its backward compatibility with existing Oracle Database and SQL workloads. Enterprises can distribute data across regions without having to rewrite applications—a massive win for teams with deeply embedded legacy systems.
That ease of migration, combined with global scale and AI-ready performance, positions Oracle’s latest Exadata service as a serious contender in the future of cloud-native enterprise computing.
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