Oracle Open World was interesting like every year. This year, Oracle started talking about features that will probably be in Oracle 19c (which is the last 12.2 release). The rumor says that it will be out in the first half of 2019 (somewhere around April-May).
As you might know, I didn’t attend a lot of sessions, but managed to gather some information about expected features (given Oracle’s safe harbor of course).
Automatic Index Creation
One of the big autonomous features is automatic creation of indexes. Oracle will automatically determine if Index creation will be beneficial (using the virtual index and invisible index features and using a real validation of the benefit). It seems that this will be available only in the cloud and maybe Exadata (at least for now).
See Hints Report
A new format will be added to DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY_CURSOR. This format (“+HINTS_REPORT”) will show us how Oracle uses our hints which will help a lot when performing manual hinting during a tuning process. Thanks Connor for mentioning that in the OOW18 presentation.
Data Guard Improvements
There are a few features here, including export and import DG configuration, some new commands and Fast Start Failover observe only mode. Thanks Yossi for the post about it.
In Memory
Writing to in-memory buffer, increasing the throughput for write intensive tables. More information in the In-Memory presentation from OOW18.