Good news for Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) investors as the software maker announced that its Database23ai platform was now available for use. Well, “generally available,” anyway, which is about the same thing. The move was sufficient to give Oracle a little extra life with investors, who sent shares up fractionally in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
Oracle’s Database23ai, which is just a database system for artificial intelligence (AI), was formerly known as “Database 23c.” The name change was to make it more on-brand as being geared for use with artificial intelligence systems. Regardless of the name, chatbots or any other tool that runs on AI will have ready access to database tools. Given how vital information is when it comes to AI use, this should be quite the step forward and should give Oracle a slice of the rapidly growing artificial intelligence market.
A Necessary Pivot
Reports note that the reason behind the move from Database 23c to Database23ai was that the developer market looked a lot more attractive to Oracle as a whole. As far back as last September, Oracle was planning to add vector search to Database 23c, which would allow Oracle Database to “…store the semantic content of documents, images, and other unstructured data as vectors….” That means much faster queries, and better service overall, a move that would distinguish Oracle in the field.
Is Oracle a Good Stock to Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on ORCL stock based on 16 Buys and 13 Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 23.02% rally in its share price over the past year, the average ORCL price target of $139.13 per share implies 21.1% upside potential.
