Tom Kyte presented his favorite 12 features of 12C, he mentioned that it was a challenge because there were 500 new features, which he narrowed to 80 and then to 12 :). Here they are.
- Default to Column
- Even better PL/SQL
- Increase of size limits for certain data types.
- Easy Top-N and pagination queries
- Row pattern matching (good for analysis of data)
- Lots of partitioning improvements (move partitions online)
- Adaptive execution plan (Your execution plan changes on the fly)
- Enhanced Statistics (New histograms).
- Temporary undo (Temporary tables store undo on temporary tablespace)
- New Data Optimization capabilities (Heat map)
- Application continuity (this is an extension of TAF), Transaction guard (this ensures web transaction do not get duplicated by error).
- Pluggable Databases.