SQL has been the „standard“ for databases for decades now and it has been improved a lot. But it has its limitations, because it enforces the relational data model.
But now Oracle has decided to replace SQL by UQL, „universal query language“. We live in modern times and of course the standard for UQL is defined, but the engine that parses and executes UQL will not be implemented. Instead queries are passed to the cloud and Oracle’s AI engine understands the UQL queries and returns the internal low level commands to access the data accordingly to the local database engine.
The new database product „Oracle U1“ works with UQL. It supports both transactions and cisactions. Data is structured in an object model. Objects belong to one or more classes, inheritance and aggregation is fully supported and it is also possible to store standalone functions and methods for classes, which are written in PL/UQL.
With Oracle U1 a new pricing model will be introduced. Licenses for Oracle U1 will be free (free like „free beer“, not like „free software“) for every kind of usage and Oracle will generate money only through the fees of AI usage for parsing the UQL queries.
For users of functional and object oriented programming languages there will be ways to integrate UQL and PL/UQL and since Oracle U1 can directly express the object hierarchy of the application domain model, it will be much easier to integrate and avoid the disruptions caused by tools like hibernate that exist due to the discrepancies of the relational and the object model.
When upgrading the software, there will be no need to migrate the database. AI will figure out how to translate stored objects that matched the domain model of a previous version of the software to the current domain model.
Also there will be UQL integration into ReactJS and Angular, so modern applications can avoid writing a „backend“ and just access the database directly from the Angular or React application running in the browser. Extra performance can be gained in such a setup by putting the database into the Oracle Cloud. For delicate data models it will be offered to store the data in data centers in a specific country and to encrypt all data in the cloud database. This will revolutionize security architectures.
