Oracle Database 20c Preview and New Features Revealed!
Oracle
Database 20c Preview
Oracle Database 20c is a yearly short term support release
allowing users to try out new functionality, or take advantage of cutting-edge
features for applications that could benefit from it. While we are very excited
about this latest release, Oracle recommends that most users should consider
upgrading to Oracle Database 19c, since it provides long term support all the
way through to April 2026. You can check on the support windows for the various
releases on the Oracle Support web site article in the
Document ID 742060.1
Converged Database
Since the initial
releases of Oracle Database, Oracle has taken the approach that storing
and managing data in a single database platform makes more sense than breaking
it up and storing it in single use engines. Using multiple independent engines
inevitably results in issues with data integrity, consistency and security. By
using a single engine that provides the best of breed support for all of the
major data types and development paradigms, users can benefit from all of
Oracle Database's key capabilities such as, ACID transactions, read
consistency, centralized security model, parallel scans and DML, online
backups, point in time recovery etc. - regardless of the approach you take to
storing the data.
Oracle Database 20c New Features
Oracle Database 20c introduces several features, far more than
is covered in this short blog posting. Therefore, for a more comprehensive
review, please take a look at the New
Features Guide and also at the new Database Features and Licensing App.
Blockchain Tables
Blockchain as a technology has promised
much in terms of solving many of the problems associated with
the verification of transactions. While considerable progress
has been made in bringing this technology to the enterprise, a number of
problems exist, with arguably the largest being the complex nature of building
applications that can support a distributed ledger.
SQL Macros
- It is not unusual for a SQL statement to grow in complexity as the number of joins increase, or the operations performed on the retrieved data becomes more involved. It is also not uncommon for developers to try and solve this problem by using stored procedures and table functions to simplify these commonly used operations. This works extremely well to simplify code, but can potentially sacrifice some performance as the SQL engine switches context with the PL/SQL Engine. In Oracle Database 20c, SQL Macros solve this problem by allowing SQL expressions and table functions to be replaced by calls to stored procedures which return a string literal to be inserted in the SQL we want to execute. It's an incredibly simple concept and one that C and Rust programmers will be familiar with. The following trivial example shows it in action.
·
Expression
based init.ora parameters : It's now possible to
base database parameters (init.ora) on calculations made on the configuration
of the system, i.e. set the database parameter CPU_COUNT on half the number of
CPUs available to the operating system.
·
Automatic
Zone Maps : Exadata can now automatically create Zone Maps based on
the predicates used in queries. Previously this was a manual operation
requiring you to understand how the data would be accessed. This can
dramatically reduce the number of blocks that need to be scanned.
·
Optimised
Graph Models : Graphs can consist of millions or even billions of edges
and vertices and so the storage optimisations we've made to the graph
capabilities in Oracle Database 20c preview release can result in big space and
performance improvements for your models.
·
Sharding
Enhancements : To make it easier to develop Java applications against
Oracle Sharding we've introduced a new Java Data Source that makes it simple to
obtain connections without having to define the shard key or manage the
connection key explicitly. We have also made sharding more fault-tolerant by
automatically looking for alternates if the shard you are working on fails
during execution.
·
Persistent
Memory Support : In Oracle Database 20c we provide support for Databases
running on top of Persistent Memory File Systems. PMEM File systems can offer
significant latency and bandwidth improvements over traditional file systems
using SSD or mechanical disks. However, the applications using them need
to understand how to safely write to them and the most efficient way to use
them in conjunction with other OS resources. Oracle Database 20c's
implementation provides atomic writes, safe guarding against partial writes
during unexpected power outages. It also offers Fast I/O operations using
memory copy. In addition it efficiently uses database buffer cache by bypassing
and reading directly from PMEM storage.
References: https://blogs.oracle.com/database/oracle-database-20c-preview
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