Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Oracle 12.2 New Features Training Summary


From May 15 to 19, I took the training course - Oracle Database 12c R2: New Features for 12c R1 Administrators Ed 1 (5 days) at ExitCertified Toronto. The instructor was Eric Wong.

By considering that Oracle Database 12c Release 2 was only available outside the Cloud in March, this training was quite new. Except those early players on the cloud, inside Oracle or “hired” by Oracle, there was really not many people to use or test this new release.  

This 5-day course was really intensive. As described in the course outline, I was expected to learn the following knowledge:


Different from the Oracle training course I took before, this one focused more on practice (>=70%). The instructor really didn’t talk too much about any topics. Some of topics only had less than 5 slides.  I spent most of my 5 days to practice, precisely speaking, cut and pasted the commands from the PDF guide. So it is not hard for you to imagine how “intensive” the training was.

When you spent most of time to catch up the practice, there was really not much time and energy for you to digest the “New Features”. It will leave to us either reviewing the course materials again after training or recalling it when using the new features in our work. No matter which option, we need to spend more time to get familiar with those new features before we totally forget.

To briefly summarize what I learned in the training, I would like to draw several high-level points below:
  • From database container (CDB) to application container – Oracle will make the database software more robust and agile to support application development.
  • Make PDB as isolate/independent as possible (from CDB) in terms of resource management, performance management, availability (backup/recovery), portability, etc.
  • Make database and related product more cloud-ready including security enhancement, monitoring (Grid Control), etc.
  • Continue to enhance the security features including auditing, privilege control, data redaction, encryption, etc.
  • Continue to enhance the performance improvement automation such as Optimizer Statistics Advisor.
  • Continue to enhance the database availability and online operations including PDB hot clone, online redefinition, online DDL capabilities and partitioning.
  • Continue to enhance the management tools including DB operations monitoring, SQL*Plus, SQLcl, ADR automatic space file management, etc.
There are something not covered in the training, but discussed or blogged by the SIG:
  • Oracle Database 12c R2 Rapid Home Provisioning and Maintenance:
  • Oracle 12c Grid Infrastructure Management Repository (GIMR)
       http://www.oracleracsig.org/events/oracle-12c-grid-infrastructure-management-repository-gimr-everything-you-wanted-to-know-2/

All in all, the best training materials for the new release are still the reference books from Oracle. Among them, it is the bible - Oracle Database Concepts, 12c Release 2 (12.2).