Oracle Database is a commercial relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Oracle Corporation. It uses the Structured Query Language (SQL) for data manipulation and management, and it provides features such as robust security, transactional consistency, and high availability.

Because of the importance of the breakthrough AI technology in the 23 release, it was renamed from 23c to 23ai. Moreover the 23ai release was later replaced by 26ai, but 26ai kept 23 for the first number of the release.

Oracle Database is distributed in various flavors (multiple cloud and on-premises offers) and has various support stages (such as Premier, Extended, Sustaining, or Custom Market Driven). Depending on these, release dates may vary. This page documents Premier and Extended support dates for Oracle Database On-Premises Server Releases for Linux x86-64.

According to the Release Schedule of Current Database Releases there are two types of Oracle Database releases:

• Long-Term Releases (LTR), which are supported for 5 years with Premier Support, followed by 3 years with Extended Support. Note that Oracle Corporation may offer, for some LTR, one year of free Extended Support.
• Innovation Releases, which are supported for at least 2 years with Premier Support and have no Extended Support.

The version and patch policy is also complex and changing, but some guidance can be found on:

• Oracle Database - Wikipedia,
• All You Need to Know about Oracle Database Patching — GotoDBA.com,
• Introducing Monthly Recommended Patches (MRPs) and FAQ (Doc ID 2898740.1) — support.oracle.com,
• Oracle Database (RDBMS) Releases Support Status Summary (Doc ID 161818.1) (requires an Oracle account with appropriate permissions).

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