About Using Oracle AI Database 26ai for Enterprise AI
- Accelerate time-to-value for AI by activating existing Oracle-resident data
- Improve answer quality and consistency with curated, policy-aligned context
- Scale confidently on Oracle's enterprise-grade performance, availability, and security
- Reduce architectural complexity by unifying data storage and vector management
Architecture
The following architecture shows a typical three‑tier deployment of Dify on OCI within one OCI region and a single VCN that spans three availability domains for high availability:
oracle-adb-dify-arch-oracle.zip
The following list summarizes the deployment and connectivity:
- An on-premises user connects to the application through the internet.
- Requests terminate on a public load balancer provided by OCI Load Balancer (LB) in a VCN.
- Front the platform with an ingress controller and OCI Load Balancer for external access to the Dify console and services.
- Public LBs require two public subnets in different availability domains (AD) for high availability (HA).
- Deploy Dify Enterprise Edition on OKE within a VCN that spans multiple ADs.
- The cluster exposes a kubernetes application programming interface (API) endpoint and runs several worker nodes.
- Each node hosts application pods. Use dedicated private pod subnet with NAT gateways so pods connect to the internet without being publicly exposed.
- Container images are pulled from OCI Container Registry over Oracle Services Network (OSN) using a service gateway.
- Use Oracle AI Database 26ai as the vector database, leveraging its native vector storage/retrieval, and enterprise features (partitioning, RAC, sharding, Exadata optimization) for scale and reliability.
The architecture has the following components:
- OCI region
An OCI region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, hosting availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).
- Availability domain
Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain shouldn't affect the other availability domains in the region.
- OCI virtual cloud
network and subnet
A virtual cloud network (VCN) is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an OCI region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
- Load balancer
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancer provides automated traffic distribution from a single entry point to multiple servers.
- OCI Kubernetes Engine
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Kubernetes Engine (OCI Kubernetes Engine or OKE) is a fully-managed, scalable, and highly available service that you can use to deploy your containerized applications to the cloud. You specify the compute resources that your applications require, and OKE provisions them on OCI in an existing tenancy. OKE uses Kubernetes to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts.
- Oracle AI Database 26ai
Oracle AI Database 26ai with AI Vector Search lets you query data by meaning rather than keywords. Vector representations (embeddings) capture the semantics of text, images, audio, and more so you can find similar content efficiently. Built-in SQL distance functions allow similarity searches using vectors. You can combine semantic similarity and other search criteria to ground large language models (RAG) for more accurate and relevant answers.
- Oracle Autonomous AI Database
Oracle Autonomous AI Database provides an easy-to-use, fully autonomous (self-governing) database that scales elastically and delivers fast query performance. As a service, it doesn't require database administration. You don't need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. It automatically handles provisioning, backing up, patching and upgrading, and growing or shrinking the database and is an elastic service. Develop scalable AI-powered apps with any data using built-in AI capabilities. Use your choice of large language model (LLM) and deploy in the cloud or your data center.
Use Cases
As enterprises implement AI development plans based on large language models (LLM) models and private data, Oracle AI Database 26ai, with its dual advantages of native vector management and mature enterprise-class features, provides a stable, efficient, and low-threshold data platform solution for the Dify Oracle AI Database Agent development framework and AI applications built on Dify.
- Resource Reuse and Cost Optimization: Enterprises no longer need to purchase dedicated vector databases and can fully reuse existing Oracle AI Database resources, significantly reducing hardware procurement and maintenance costs.
- Capability Scalability: As multimodal data (such as industrial images and audio logs) becomes increasingly common in enterprise AI applications, Oracle AI Database 26ai can further expand multimodal vector retrieval capabilities, providing more comprehensive AI support for scenarios such as smart manufacturing and medical diagnosis.
- Stability Guarantee: Leveraging Oracle AI Database's years of experience in partitioning, RAC, and Exadata optimization, Oracle AI Database 26ai can easily handle petabyte-level data volumes and high-concurrency scenarios, ensuring 24/7 stable operation for enterprise AI applications.
Oracle AI Database 26ai is not only the core carrier of enterprise vector data management, but also the key technical foundation for promoting the transformation of enterprises from data storage to AI value mining, providing solid technical support for enterprise intelligent upgrades.
Considerations
When integrating Dify with OCI, consider these options.
- Use private subnets for app/data tiers, NSGs over security lists where possible.
- Use OCI Vault for secrets (API keys, DB creds), IAM policies least‑privileged, and OCI Logging, Monitoring, and Alarms for observability.
- Consider multiple availability domain node pools and load balancer health checks for high availability and auto scaling.
About Required Services and Roles
This solution requires the following services and roles:
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Oracle Autonomous AI Database
- OCI Kubernetes Engine
- Dify Enterprise Edition
These are the roles needed for each service.
| Service Name: Role | Required to... |
|---|---|
| Dify: User | Create a user Dify identified by password default tablespace with users quota
unlimited.
|
Dify: DB_DEVELOPER_ROLE |
Allow administrators to quickly assign privileges developers need to design, build, and deploy applications for the Oracle Database. |
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