Announcing ODP.NET 23ai — New Async, OpenTelemetry, AI Vector Search Support, and More
I’m excited to announce ODP.NET 23ai and Oracle Database 23ai production releases. This database version is available in the cloud and on-premises. ODP.NET is free for all and Oracle Database is free for developers. This Oracle Database 23ai blog post has more info about the database’s numerous new features (and what happened to the 23c naming convention). 😊
As you’ve probably deduced, the “ai” in ODP.NET 23ai refers to “Artificial Intelligence”. This new ODP.NET version incorporates support for Oracle AI Vector Search, allowing apps to perform similarity searches, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and outlier search. The ODP.NET dev guide describes how to use Oracle AI vector search with your .NET apps.
Natural language query support is another recent innovation. Oracle calls it Select AI. Users and developers can ask the database what they are looking for in plain English. Oracle translates the text into SQL, executes it, and returns the results. Select AI is available from the ODP.NET provider.
The 23ai release doesn’t just include new AI features. There are a whole array of major performance, observability, ease of use, high availability, and scalability enhancements as well. The ODP.NET 23ai what’s new section summarizes all 25 new ODP.NET features.
Over the past year or so, I’ve written about most of these ODP.NET 23ai features. Here are those blog posts:
- ODP.NET JSON Relational Duality and Oracle Database 23 Free
- First ODP.NET 23 (23.2) Dev Release, which covered asynchronous programming, pipelining, Application Continuity, queues, and more
- Oracle .NET and Java OpenTelemetry
- ODP.NET 23.3.2 Dev Release, which detailed .NET Metrics, OpenTelemetry enhancements, and centralized configuration provider updates
- ODP.NET 23.3.3 Dev Release, which described Transparent Application Failover and performance improvements
- Getting Started with ODP.NET 23 Application Continuity
To help you develop apps with these new capabilities, I published several ODP.NET code samples on GitHub:
- ODP.NET async
- ODP.NET single sign-on using with Microsoft Entra ID/Azure Active Directory
- ODP.NET Application Continuity
I teamed up with my colleague, Kuassi Mensah, to highlight new 23ai application observability features in ODP.NET and Oracle JDBC in this video:
Start Developing with ODP.NET 23ai Today
ODP.NET 23ai can be downloaded from NuGet Gallery. The downloads include:
- ODP.NET Core 23ai
- Managed ODP.NET 23ai for .NET Framework
- Oracle Entity Framework Core 23ai
- ODP.NET OpenTelemetry 23ai
- ODP.NET for Azure 23ai for Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on and storing ODP.NET configuration in Azure
- ODP.NET for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 23ai for Oracle Cloud single sign-on and storing ODP.NET configuration in Oracle Cloud
- ODP.NET for File Configuration 23ai for storing ODP.NET configuration on-premises and on cloud infrastructure
- Oracle Entity Framework 23ai
- Oracle Providers for ASP.NET 23ai
You can also learn more about all these new features by referencing the ODP.NET 23ai documentation.
