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What's new in Oracle Database 12c

Jon Tullett
By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 02 Oct 2012

The next generation of Oracle's flagship database product will ship in 2013, bringing a host of new features and performance improvements. Andy Mendelsohn, senior VP of database server technologies, took to the stage at Oracle OpenWorld to reveal more details of the company's upcoming Oracle Database 12c and discuss what it will mean for enterprise customers.



Although the new version will boast over 500 new features, Mendelsohn said the focus was on a handful of major innovations.



Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has described 12c as having a "fundamentally new architecture", and top of the agenda was the new pluggable database framework, bringing virtualisation benefits to database management. Mendelsohn demonstrated how existing databases, upgraded to the new version, could be imported into new containers while running, without disruption. Multiple databases sharing RAM, storage and OS processes achieve much more efficient use of resources and can offer far greater scalability.



Given a suitable workload, the company claims to be able to deliver five times the scalability, with a sixth of the hardware resources. With IT budgets under pressure, Mendelsohn noted that, for many customers, higher performance on the same infrastructure could equate directly to cost savings.



"Database consolidation is hard. Our customers are under pressure to reduce the number of servers, consolidate databases and schemas, and reduce staff," Mendelsohn said. Oracle Database 12c's pluggable architecture takes aim at that challenge, he said, and will help greatly reduce the overhead of managing numerous disparate databases.



With 12c's multi-tenant approach comes new management tools, including database prioritisation and resource utilisation, centralised backup, and updating. Entire containers can be backed up in single runs, regardless of how many databases they contain.



Centralised patching is a major improvement, coupled with database cloning and duplication for testing. Customers can test patches against database copies, rolling patches out centrally once testing is complete. Cloning is also a benefit for development - live databases can be duplicated almost instantaneously with the copy-on-write capabilities in ZFS, which Oracle acquired with Sun Microsystems.



Security has also received attention. Oracle Database 12c includes database-level redaction, allowing granular control of access to sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, personal data or financial information. Based on the user profile accessing the data, database redaction policies mask the information, before it is presented to the application, preventing accidental leakage through coding errors or security breaches.



Mendelsohn also demonstrated the database's automatic data optimisation features, which help administrators visualise usage in a heat map, highlighting tables and specific data that are most active. Inactive data can be more aggressively compressed or archived, greatly reducing storage costs. Optimisation can be run on live databases with no disruption.



Hardware news is on the database horizon, too, alongside a swathe of upgrades to the company's server range. The next generation of Sparc processors will feature database logic in silicon, offloading CPU workloads and promising significant performance improvements. Partner Fujitsu, manufacturing the chips, says they will ship "early in 2013".


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