Today, we had the opportunity to follow several sessions concerning the upcoming Oracle Database 12c release. Like Apple, Oracle keeps the secret over Oracle Database 12c, but tends to deviate from the Silicon Valley secret culture. However, we can relay all that we heard to you 😉

OOW2012-Oraboat

Over the past 10 years, Oracle has worked on plenty of state of the art topics like compression, in-memory operations, scalability, and this is still true for Oracle Database 12c.

Instead of discussing high-level database administration and configuration, we will simply summarize some real-life, daily useables:

  • Moving and Renaming ad datafile is now ONLINE
  • RMAN TABLE Point-In-Time Recovery (combination of data pump and RMAN, auxiliary instance required)
  • Global Temporary Tables can now be used on an Active Guard standby database
  • Automatic data optimization, cold data are now totally handled by the database (extension from the Oracle 11g feature with a time lifecycle) allows for better Infrastructure Management (moving cold data to cheaper file system)
  • Oracle Enterprise Manage Express (lightweight EM Cloud Control 12c version) replaces the Oracle Database console and is installed automatically
  • The TRUNCATE command has been enhanced with a CASCADE option which follows child records

Oracle Dabatase 12c comes with around 1000 new features. Some of them are reserved for Exadata customers: the Oracle dictionary with approximately 226 new static views, 131 performance views, and 13 new database init* parameters.

The most interesting new parameter concerns the management of the Private Global Area (PGA). PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET was neither a limit nor a max size to address this problem which is why Oracle introduced the parameter PGA_AGGREGATE_LIMIT which is a real memory limit.

The DBA job will not became easier, some very useful Oracle 11g are still not widely used, like Result cache, or the parameter RESUMABLE_TIMEOUT.

Year after year, the database technology evolves very quickly and tools like Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (12c) evolve in the same way.