2019 - The Year to Upgrade!

Oracle Database 19c has just been released (for more details see Willie Hardie's Oracle Blog entry) and is available on Oracle Live SQL, which allows you to test various SQL features of Oracle Database 19c live & for free on the web! There are also still some seats available on the Oracle Database 19c Beta Program, but with General Availability for Oracle Database 19c planned for "1HCY19", joining the program now might be a bit late and hence, Oracle Live SQL is a great opportunity to test right away.

Why to Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c?

Oracle Database 19c not only represents a leap in database technology compared to the database versions most commonly used by Oracle's customers today (Oracle Database 11g Release 2, more precisely, 11.2.0.4 and even Oracle Database 12c Rel. 2 for this matter), it is also the first long term support release since the naming and release schedule change. Last but not least, the amount of new features introduced with Oracle Database 19c represents a good balance between innovation and stabilization in that the right amount of time and effort was spent to enhance and stabilize features that have already been introduced with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 while these features were complemented by new functionality first introduced in Oracle Database 18c or 19c (which could make Oracle Database 18c a good alternative, if your upgrade cycle does not permit waiting for Oracle Database 19c).

Some Examples to Consider

• Ever since Oracle Database 12c Rel. 2, Oracle maintains two high availability and horizontal scalability solutions for the Oracle Database - Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Oracle Sharding. Both solutions, albeit being in different stages in their product lifecycle and partially addressing different scalability and availability scenarios, have greatly advanced with Oracle Database 18c and 19c in that Oracle Sharding 19c has a very compelling and comprehensive feature set, while Oracle RAC 18c and later has set new records in scalability and recoverability considering outage times incurred by a failure or a maintenance task. To get the best of both solutions, customers can even choose to implement RAC Sharding starting with Oracle 18c.

• Oracle (Active) Data Guard has been enhanced to further minimize outages in case of disastrous events and hence, continuous to be Oracle's preferred disaster recovery solution for the Oracle Database. At the same time and based on your feedback, Oracle Active Data Guard 19c has been enhanced with a rich set of features that allows for an even more active use of the standby database. One of the most intriguing features in this context is called "DML Redirection", as it allows for occasional updates on the standby.
• Based on various enhancements in different technologies that form the foundation for Oracle's industry-leading Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA), Oracle MAA has further evolved and secured its position as the leading high availability solution in today's database market. This is most evident from the fact that Oracle MAA in the Cloud has provided the basis for the SLA promise that Larry Ellison has announced for the dedicated Autonomous Database Service that will be available later in 2019. Oracle MAA has also replaced other HA blueprints and best practices, as it does not only provide guidance to optimize the availability of the Oracle Database with the least amount of complexity, but at the same time discusses failure scenarios which any database vendor, database user as well as application developer needs to think about.

The Time to Prepare is Now

Unfortunately, none of those features which have already been presented, talked about and announced in various conferences, including Oracle Open World 2018, DOAG2018, UKOUG Tech18 and Sangam18, can be tested using Oracle Live SQL, but with Oracle Database 19c General Availability to be announced any day now, now is the time to start preparing and to get more information about those enhancements. The material linked throughout this article might help. 2019 is the year to upgrade to Oracle Database 19c!

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in this "preview article" are my own and do not represent the opinions of the company for which I work (Oracle) by any means.

Tags: #Oracle #database #RDBMS #upgrade #oraclecloud #cloud #MAA #RAC #HighAvailability #HA #availability #scalability #OOW18 #DOAG2018 #Tech18 #UKOUG #Sangam18 #OOWLON #sharding #thinkautonomous