ORACLE's Code Assistant: Arrival to the GENAI Party in Style

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A new GenAI tool is being brewed internally at Oracle and will be released to the market in the future to meet the specific needs of developers such as Java and SQL developers.

Translated from Oracle's Code Assist: Fashionably Late to the GenAI Party , author Darryl K Taft.

Oracle announced its intention to join the GenAI party and launched a new AI-based tool in development called Oracle Code Assist that will help developers build applications faster.

While the technology looks promising, especially for Java and SQL developers, it’s considered long overdue given that tools like GitHub Copilot , OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others are already leading the way. Additionally, Oracle Code Assist is not even available outside of Oracle yet.

Late?

"Oracle is late to the party, but sometimes these are the best guests -- because they can help replenish the party," said Holger Mueller , an analyst at Constellation Research . "In the case of Oracle, they bring a lot of GPU capacity, a lot of Java domain expertise and a lot of coding experience. So in a way, they get the party started."

Omdia analyst Brad Shimmin agrees.

"Yes, if you're talking about Microsoft Copilot, CodeLlama, etc. style universal copilot, they are relatively late to the party," he said.

However, "here we're talking about a code generation system that might be fine-tuned for the Java language and pre-trained on some very high-quality code," Shimmin said. "I expect their efforts here will mirror what the company has done in SQL generation, which is specific to the Oracle software development paradigm and more importantly consistent with and based on the customer's own context."

What's more, Oracle is building this system based on a rich set of code optimization algorithms and techniques, he explained, and the company has decades of experience optimizing customer database queries.

The release of Oracle Code Assist is intended to demonstrate to customers and developers that Oracle is actively developing AI-assisted development tools tailored to their specific needs and expertise.

Potential widespread adoption

"Developers will be able to use Oracle Code Assist to quickly upgrade entire Java applications to newer versions. The ability to quickly upgrade Java using Coding Assistant greatly empowers enterprises to improve application resiliency and performance, integrate the latest JDK features, and enhance their security posture capabilities," Arnal Dayaratna , research vice president at IDC , said in a statement. "Oracle Code Assist can also accelerate database upgrades involving the refactoring and testing of complex and often custom PL/SQL code, which can be time-consuming and very expensive. Given the ubiquity of Java and databases in the enterprise, Oracle Code Assist Likely to be widely adopted by reputed organizations across the globe.”

Vijay Kumar, vice president of product marketing and application development at OCI, told The New Stack that Oracle Code Assist is an AI code companion that increases developer speed, enhances code consistency, and targets Java applications and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Optimized for specific scenarios.

The main function

Oracle Code Assist is powered by a large language model (LLM) that runs on OCI and is optimized for application development on OCI. It will provide context-specific recommendations tailored to an organization's best practices and code base, Kumar said, and can be used to update, upgrade and refactor code written in most modern programming languages such as Python and others.

The tool is a plug-in that developers can install in popular development environments such as JetBrains IDEA IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code , with more to come.

The tool is powered by AI models running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, trained and fine-tuned for Java, SQL and NetSuite’s SuiteScript .

Key features include code generation, test case generation, documentation creation, automatic language upgrades, code analysis for optimization and code descriptions for new talents.

Oracle Code Assist is currently available to Oracle's more than 40,000 internal developers. Kumar said future releases to external developers will be in the works.

“Customized applications are how every organization differentiates itself on a global scale, but building, deploying and maintaining applications requires significant labor and time,” Aanand Krishnan , vice president of product management at OCI, said in a statement. “Leveraging Oracle Code Assist's organizations help developers increase speed and code consistency, thereby improving long-term application maintenance in a secure, rigorous and compliant manner."

At the same time, it differs from other AI coding tools by targeting specific use cases important to Oracle's customer base, leveraging Oracle's expertise in languages such as Java and SQL, and providing non-LLM-based additional functionality, such as error fixes and performance tuning.

Additionally, the tool helps with language upgrades, refactoring old code, and provides recommendations for improving performance.

Kumar said early internal usage patterns show developers are using the tool primarily for coding advice, documentation and testing.

Kumar said Oracle is constantly evaluating and fine-tuning AI models to provide the best performance and experience among its developer base.

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