Even More 12.2 Features

A few days ago I was browsing the documentation and suddenly realized that I haven’t gone over the 12.2 books. One of the things I like to do is reading the “New Features” guide, so I did. After writing about the major features, here are some smaller ones, but still important enough to know.

Transparent Failover to Active Data Guard

In environments with Active Data Guard, when the database role changes, users are disconnected and need to reconnect to the new primary. With this feature, users that are only querying the primary database (don’t have open transactions), and use a dedicated service that can failover, will be automatically connected to the new primary after the role change. During the role change they will feel a pause, but won’t need to reconnect.

Read-Only Partitions

In 12.2 we can set partitions and sub-partitions to read-only mode. This makes history partitions easier to manage and protect.

Renaming Datafiles During Import

When importing transportable tablespaces, there is a new impdp clause (REMAP_DATAFILE) that allows us to rename or transform datafiles names during the import itself.

Different Endian Format for Data Guard Broker

In Oracle 12.2 the Data Guard Broker now supports redo transport between primary and standby with different endian format. This increase the support and simplicity of having primary and standby on different platforms. I often see questions regarding moving database from one platform to another with minimal downtime, this feature will help a lot in doing this, even if the source and target have different endian format.

Running Host Commands in DGMGRL

I was waiting for this feature, which is so simple and small. When in DGMGRL command line, now it is possible to use the HOST command or the exclamation mark (!) to run operating system commands, just like in sqlplus.

Data Guard and PDB

There are a couple of feature here. The first one is that we can have standby database to only some of the PDBs in the same container (and not all of them like before). The second one is that we can failover only a single PDB to the standby and not the entire container database with all of its PDBs.

New RMAN commands

These new commands are easier to use, even though they don’t really introduce new capabilities. The “set newname” command was extended to allow renaming all the files at once, instead of renaming them one by one during restore. The new command “move” allows us to move files to a new location instead of backup them to the new location and then delete the old file. And last, the new “restore+recover” command allows us to perform both restore and recover of files in a single line.

Summary

It seems like 12.2 is full of new stuff and it will be interesting to try them our. Oracle 12.2 already exists on the cloud, but because the cloud doesn’t allow us to manage the infrastructure, we will be able to try these features only with the on-premise version.
According to the current information we have, the on-premise version will be released on March 15th, I hope it won’t be postpone as I’m excited about this version already.