-- Oracle RDBMS 12c was formaly released today --

The new version of Oracle has over 500 new features, some of those features indicate to me that in order to achieve them they did a massive re-architecture. The one that called my attention the most was pluggable database, apparently you create a database defined as a container, and you can add up to 255 pluggable databases to the same container, now this is the interesting part, in the past 1 instance belongs to one and only one database, however a database can have many instances (RAC), well now that instance that is the container is shared among all the pluggable databases on it. All the databases in the same container inherit the features of the container database (RAC, DG, etc).

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.

1. Default to Column
2. Even better PL/SQL
3. Increase of size limits for certain data types.
4. Easy Top-N and pagination queries
5. Row pattern matching (good for analysis of data)
6. Lots of partitioning improvements (move partitions online)
7. Adaptive execution plan (Your execution plan changes on the fly)
8. Enhanced Statistics (New histograms).
9. Temporary undo (Temporary tables store undo on temporary tablespace)
10. New Data Optimization capabilities (Heat map)
11. Application continuity (this is an extension of TAF), Transaction guard (this ensures web transaction do not get duplicated by error).
12. Pluggable Databases.

You can get more details about this at http://otn.oracle.com