Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Oracle Database 26ai on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle, described as Oracle’s first AI-native database release on Amazon RDS, with generative AI, vector search, and machine learning built into the engine. Amazon RDS handles backups, patching, Multi-AZ high availability, and read replicas. The post demonstrates Select AI, which allows users to query relational data using natural language prompts powered by foundation models (FMs) on Amazon Bedrock. Under the hood, the Oracle DBMS_CLOUD_AI package constructs a prompt including table schemas, sends it to the chosen foundation model, runs the generated SQL against live data, and returns results within the same database session. Amazon Bedrock is fully managed and serverless, with no GPUs to provision, no models to host, and no inference endpoints to maintain. Users access foundation models from providers such as Anthropic, Meta, and Amazon through a single API and can switch between them by changing one attribute in the DBMS_CLOUD_AI profile. Select AI requests travel over virtual private cloud (VPC) interface endpoints, keeping data within the VPC and off the public internet. DBMS_CLOUD_AI is native PL/SQL. This is Part 1 of a three-part series; Part 2 covers Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with Oracle AI Vector Search, and Part 3 focuses on GraphRAG