As the status of an on-premises version of Oracle Database 23ai remains in limbo, the company has tossed a bone to its on-prem Oracle Database 19c customers in the form of an extension of Premier Support to Dec. 31, 2029, and Extended Support to Dec. 31, 2032.

This stretches Extended Support from its previous 2024-2027 timeline, announced in 2022, increasing the product’s lifespan by another five years. This emulates companies such as SAP, which is granting reprieves to its on-prem S/4HANA customers.

However, as with SAP, there are some gotchas. During the period from May 1, 2027, through Dec. 31, 2032, Oracle will exclude support for BSAFE crypto libraries, Java, or any Java-related products, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Native Network Encryption, Transparent Data Encryption, DBMS_CRYPTO programmatic encryption, both C and Java utilities, and FIPS compliance.

Oracle Database versions 19c and 23ai are currently the company’s two long-term releases. Oracle Database 23c was released in September 2023, renamed to Oracle Database 23ai in May 2024, and is now available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Database Appliance. Last year, Oracle said the renaming was “because of the importance of the breakthrough AI technology in this release.” The release’s Premier support extends until Dec. 31, 2031, with the Extended Support end date yet to be announced.

In its release guidance, Oracle said, “For product longevity and patching, Oracle strongly recommends upgrading to 19c which is the current on-premises Long Term release with a support end date of December 31, 2032 (or December 31, 2029, if you choose not to pay Extended Support fees or purchase a ULA [Unlimited license agreement]). … The next Long Term release is 23ai. To upgrade to 23ai, you must be on 19c or later.”

Analysts think that Oracle is likely trying to nudge customers toward the cloud by holding back on an on-prem version of Oracle Database 23ai.

“One could argue from a commercial and a technology perspective as to why 23ai has not been released to on-premises environments currently,” said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group. “It could be that Oracle wants to continue testing 23ai’s performance across an array of typical server configurations found on premises to ensure performance parity with 23ai’s capabilities on OCI and Exadata. Alternatively, Oracle could be seeking to emphasize its cloud offerings and keep the most cutting-edge functionality tied to cloud migrations. I view the latter as the more probable reason, but this is speculation as Oracle has not formally responded to this question.”

Bickley pointed out that this aligns with the trend of Oracle competitors, specifically SAP, which is no longer innovating on its on-premises S/4HANA product and database, instead concentrating on their cloud efforts.

“This is Oracle’s gentle (some may say not so gentle) nudge to get organizations to move to their Oracle environments to the cloud,” said Matt Kimball, vice president and principal analyst, data center compute and storage, Moor Insights & Strategy. “Actually, not supporting 23ai on-prem is the gentle nudge. Not supporting all of the AI goodness in 19c is perhaps the not so gentle nudge — such as AI Vector Search, RAG and AI Assistant.”

Bickley added, “Most organizations running Oracle DB loads are doing so because they require enterprise-grade performance, latency, and advanced features and functionality. Taking on DB upgrades is a non-trivial task requiring meticulous planning, testing, and execution as these databases are often running revenue-generating or critical internal workloads. A jump from 19c to 23ai is a significant gap that many legacy on-premises organizations may not yet have a risk appetite or budget to embark upon imminently.”

And, Bickley noted, the new AI capabilities have not yet demonstrated a positive return on investment (ROI). “Oracle may be employing a push/pull approach in this case: providing a runway for legacy workloads to continue unimpeded while necessitating a more fulsome migration to either OCI or their Exadata/Oracle Database Appliance,” he said.

Kimball agreed. “I would not be surprised if Oracle did not release 23ai as a traditional on-premises offering — contrary to what others may say,” he said. “I don’t believe 19c is a way to extend existing on-premises environments until 23ai is ready. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that this very popular distribution still has a large customer footprint and requires care and feeding, specifically, among very large customers who have no plans of migrating — regardless of the lack of AI features.

“So 23ai (and beyond) is for the modern data center that is creating and storing data in multiple formats but must use it all as they operationalize AI across the organization,” Kimball concluded. “And 19c runs a parallel track for those that simply want that super performant, resilient, and secure SQL database environment.”