Monday, February 19, 2018

Oracle 18c is on the cloud now

After Valentine Day, Oracle officially released Oracle Database 18c on the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems on Feb.16. If you still follow the old Oracle release pattern, Oracle 18c is equivalent to Oracle 12c Release 2 (12.2.0.2).

To get to know more about this release, besides reading Oracle official blog above, you can digest the following blogs from several Oracle gurus.
If you want to know the new features of this release, you can take a look at the following guide:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/18/newft/new-features.html

Since this new release is not available for on-premise environment yet, you can try it with LiveSQL even you don't have Oracle Cloud account:

https://livesql.oracle.com/apex/livesql/file/index.html

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Oracle 18c is coming soon

Yesterday (Jan.22, 2018) the email alert from Oracle subjected on "Oracle Support HOT Topics" had an item "Release Schedule of Current Database Releases" with last updated date on Jan 19, 2018.

When I accessed the link, it directed to the Metalink Note:742060.1.  Under the section "What's New?", you will see the following information:
  • 19-Jan-2018 - added release 18 to the table
So for every release schedule table, a column for Oracle release 18 is added. From the schedule, we can get:

  • Oracle 18c for Oracle Public Cloud Releases will be available at 1Q2018 (means some time within the 1st quarter of 2018). And the same release time is applied to On-Premises Engineered Systems including Oracle Database Appliance and Exadata.
  • Oracle 18c for On-Premises Server (including client) will be available on H2CY2018 (means some time within second 6 months of 2018) for Linux x86-64, Solaris 64-bit (SPARC and x86), HP-UX Itanium, Windows 64-bit and IBM AIX/Linux platforms.

To help user plan ahead, Oracle also provides a roadmap of patch sets for Oracle Database major release 11.1 and beyond, "showing planned release dates and the duration of their support lives in relationship to the overall release life. The chart is by nature somewhat simplified so be sure to read the details below it to help you interpret it correctly."

The chart has been updated with Oracle 18c(was 12.2.0.2) and 19c(was 12.2.0.3).