Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Oracle Database 12c – Almost ready to compete in DB market


Oracle in the last Open World conference help in October 2012 announced their new database platform, Oracle Database 12c. Oracle has worked hard in developing a competitive database solution and recently there is a news of this new DB solution to be launched in days or few. I am not sure whether, Oracle would be launching it soon or not, as none of their press release mentioned about this announcement. It might be a rumor as well.
While exploring more about Oracle 12c, I found that there are various new advanced features which stands good in this competitive database market. I will try to cover as many features as I am aware of, in this blog, and will continue writing more blogs about new features of Oracle 12c. The information here is just my understanding from different articles, news and press release.
One of the main feature of Oracle 12c which has made so hype in the market is its pluggable database. It is basically a new concept where it breaks the database into two distinct entities. First one being the container database which holds all the functionality and metadata required to run the database and second being the user's database which is independent from the container database. As the name suggest, it enables the organizations to plug out a database from one container database and then plug in into another container database, which will be very helpful while migrating, and in high availability scenarios. More and detailed information about Pluggable database can be found here.
Another features is Multithreaded Database, a feature that may have significant performance and scalability implications. This feature allows multiple threads to exist in a single process and execute independently, while sharing the process's state and resources. It results in higher performance as context switching between threads is faster in the same process as compared to context switching between processes.
Next one in the list can be duplicate indexes, in the older version of Oracle DB, when a user try to create an index using the same columns, in the same order, as an existing index, there used to be an error. But with Oracle 12c, one can use two different types of index on the same data. Some of the other enhancements which I have heard are related to security, MapReduce within the new database, 32k VARCHAR2 Support, and many more.
Another latest improvement in Oracle as a platform is the Oracle Private Cloud, which gives users the advantages of a public-cloud service while running on Exadata and/or Exalogic servers that reside in a customer’s data center. The Oracle Database Cloud is based on monthly subscription -"per user-per month or per environment-per month basis".
A fully supported rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database i.e. Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX) is available at no cost with all editions of the Oracle database. It allows users to develop and deploy professional applications that are both fast and secure using only a web browser.

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