In Andy Mendelsohn’s openworld 2012 keynote presentation, he mentioned 3 key new features of the oracle database 12c. For those of you who were unable to attend the keynote and do not have the 50 minutes to watch the replay, here is the reader’s digest version of the features.

Pluggable Databases

In a pluggable database environment, you create a single database container, and plug multiple databases into this container. They key design feature here is that, all these databases then share the exact same oracle server processes (aka background processes) and memory (Unlike in the previous versions where each database got its own set of background processes and shared memory allocation).

In oracle versions upto 11gr2, when you used database resource management, you had to setup resource plans per database, and each of the database did not know about the resource utilization of other databases on the same server. So you have to use Instance Caging in order to ensure that database’s used only their allocated amount of cpu resources. In Oracle 12c, since all the databases use the same container, the container will know about the resource utilization of all the databases and hence can do the database resource management efficiently.

This lends itself well to consolidating into larger databases.

Database Heatmaps

In 12c the oracle database keep’s track of which data in your tables are being selected/updated/deleted/inserted frequently. Then the database can decide what type of compression to apply to data that has different transaction profiles. Oracle 12c will also have the ability to compress the data as per the above tracking and analysis.

Database consolidated replay

When you are consolidating multiple databases into a single database (Maybe in the oracle database machine), you can now capture workloads from multiple databases and replay them on a single target database.

This helps with consolidating databases into pluggable databases in 12c.

Andy did not forget to mention that, there are around 500 new features in 12c.

The details on how these features work, will become available, closer to when the database 12c is actually released.