10 Oracle 23ai Features That Make Everyday SQL Easier
Everyone wants to talk about vector search and AI-powered everything when Oracle 23ai comes up. Fair enough, that’s the headline feature. But after spending real hours in SQL*Plus and SQLcl against a 23ai instance, the stuff that’s actually changed my day-to-day isn’t the AI layer; it’s a batch of small SQL fixes that Oracle should honestly have shipped a decade ago. Here are ten of them that I use constantly now, along with the reasons they matter.
1. Native BOOLEAN type
For years, every Oracle shop I’ve worked in had its own house style for representing true/false: a NUMBER(1), a CHAR(1) with ‘Y’/’N’, sometimes both in the same schema depending on who wrote the table. 23ai finally gives you a real BOOLEAN column type, usable in tables, PL/SQL, and JSON handling without the translation layer. It sounds trivial until you’re the one writing a CASE WHEN just to convert ‘Y’...
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