Oracle 21c New Features Summary

This time last year I started writing about the new features in Oracle 20c.  It was a beta release on the Oracle Cloud only.  I anxiously awaited its release for on-prem deployments, which normally occurs between late July and mid-September to coincide with Oracle OpenWorld.  Well, as you know, OOW '20 was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic and 20c was not released.  Finally, in late December, Oracle announced 20c was withdrawn and they were moving forward with 21c.

Oracle 21c is currently only available as a preview on Oracle Cloud.  Software downloads for on-prem testing should be available in mid-2021.

Each time Oracle starts working on a new release I wonder what new features they could possibly add.  I mean, it already has everything that anyone could need, right?  It has parallelism, partitioning, geospatial, full text search, row level security, active-active clustering with RAC, active-standby clustering with Data Guard, sharding, and the list goes on.  It also supports relational models, star-schemas, and unstructured data across a variety of workloads from transactional to analytic.

Sometimes what's old is new again.  Many advertised new features are really enhancements to previously released features.  Also, some features are just repackaged, like AQ Shared Queues available since Oracle 12c have been re-advertised as a new feature in 21c called Transactional Event Queues.

There are a ton of behavioral changes in 21c.  Consider read-only Oracle Homes which were introduced as an option in 18c and became the default in 21c.  It is not a 21c new feature, but the fact that Oracle Homes are read-only by default is a new behavior in 21c.

It's also important to note some features have gone away.  Oracle 21c does not support Oracle's classic database architecture and all newly created databases must use the CDB format.  Oracle RAC's policy-managed databases are desupported.  ASM's domain clusters are desupported, and the ASM Cluster File System (ACFS) is desupported on Windows.  Oracle is also doing away with classic auditing in favor of Unified Auditing: classic auditing is deprecated at this point, not fully desupported.

The truly new features are listed here alphabetically,

  • Attention Log (blog)
  • Blockchain Tables (blog)
  • Database Nest (blog)
  • JavaScript Execution inside the Database
  • JSON Data Type
  • Object Activity Tracking System (blog)
  • Persistent Memory Databases
  • Sharding Advisor Command Line Tool
  • SQL Macros

Check my blog for a separate and complete write-up for each new feature listed above.

There are several more advertised "new features" that are arguably just enhancements to existing features, but let's agree that the ones listed below are "new automations" for existing features ...

  • Automatic In-Memory (blog)
  • Automatic Indexing (requires Exadata hardware)
  • Automatic Materialized Views (requires Exadata hardware)
  • Automatic SecureFiles Defragmentation (blog)
  • Automatic Zone Maps (requires Exadata hardware)

As you can see, 3 of the 5 new automations are not available to many Oracle customers because they require Exadata hardware, according to the Oracle 21c Licensing Guide.  But then again, if you're running on the Oracle Cloud then odds are you are on Exadata hardware and eligible to use these features.

And they aren’t entirely new.  Automatic In-Memory was introduced in 18c, and Automatic Indexing was introduced in 19c.  Maybe they were reworked in 21c, but does that make them new features?

I used to hear the "new is old" song a lot in Oracle Education courses.  The instructor would start talking about some new feature and say, "we actually introduced this back in …" and this would happen many, many times during class.

Whether or not something is truly new probably doesn't matter to the average Joe.  It's their usefulness that matters.  Think about the above listed automations for Exadata hardware and how they help the Oracle Cloud admins.  These automations take care of routine monitoring and tuning so humans can focus on other tasks.

Clearly, I skipped a lot of stuff.  The Oracle New Features guide is really long, and this blog is really short.  I'm not going to dive into the countless changes made to programming languages, packages, and types in 21c.  I do plan to blog about enhancements in ASM, Data Guard, Data Pump, RMAN, and many other aspects of Oracle.  Stay tuned.   

Keep in mind 21c is an innovation release, not a long-term release.  It is meant for learning about new features, but those new features are not carved in stone.  Oracle can add more new features, change them, and remove them in the upcoming long-term release.  If you look back at Oracle 12c, it seemed like most of the major new features were added in patchset 12.1.0.2 not in the base release.

I hope this blog post gave you a rough idea of the Oracle 21c new features compared to enhancements.  Be sure to check out my blog posts that provide additional details on each of the new features mentioned above.

Disclaimers: I have never worked for Oracle, I have no insider information, and I own no shares of stock.  Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation.

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