• Parallel NFS Support in Direct NFS Client

  Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), Oracle Direct NFS Client supports parallel NFS. Parallel NFS is an NFSv4.1 option that allows direct client access to file servers, enabling scalable distributed storage.

  See Also:

  Oracle Grid Infrastructure Installation Guide for Linux

• Direct NFS Dispatcher Support

  Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2), Oracle Direct NFS Client supports adding a dispatcher or I/O slave infrastructure. For very large database deployments running Oracle Direct NFS Client, this feature facilitates scaling of sockets and TCP connections to multi-path and clustered NAS storage.

  See Also:

  Oracle Grid Infrastructure Installation Guide for Linux

• Kerberos Authentication for Direct NFS

  Oracle Database now supports Kerberos implementation with Direct NFS communication. This feature solves the problem of authentication, message integrity, and optional encryption over unsecured networks for data exchange between Oracle Database and NFS servers using Direct NFS protocols.

  See Also:

  Oracle Grid Infrastructure Installation Guide for Linux

• AL32UTF8 As the Default Database Character Set

  Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), the default database character set of a database created from the General Purpose/Transaction Processing or the Data Warehousing template is Unicode AL32UTF8. Oracle recommends that you use Unicode AL32UTF8 as the database character set.

  See Also:

  About Character Set Selection During Installation

• Postinstallation Configuration of Oracle Software using the -executeConfigTools option

  Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), you can perform postinstallation configuration of Oracle products by running the Oracle Database or Oracle Grid Infrastructure installer with the -executeConfigTools option. You can use the same response file created during installation to complete postinstallation configuration.

  See Also:

  Postinstallation Configuration Using Response File Created During Installation

• SCAN Listener Supports HTTP Protocol

  Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), SCAN listener enables connections for the recovery server coming over HTTP to be redirected to different machines based on the load on the recovery server machines.

• Separation of Duty for Administering Oracle Real Application Clusters

  Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), Oracle Database provides support for separation of duty best practices when administering Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) by introducing the SYSRAC administrative privilege for the clusterware agent. This feature removes the need to use the powerful SYSDBA administrative privilege for Oracle RAC.

  SYSRAC, like SYSDG, SYSBACKUP and SYSKM, helps enforce separation of duties and reduce reliance on the use of SYSDBA on production systems. This administrative privilege is the default mode for connecting to the database by the clusterware agent on behalf of the Oracle RAC utilities such as SRVCTL.

• Enhancements to Cluster Verification Utility

  Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) assists in the installation and configuration of Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC). CVU performs a range of tests, covering all intermediate stages during the installation and configuration of a complete Oracle RAC stack. In this release, CVU provides several enhancements, such as information about the progress of each check and allowing you to specify an output format such as XML or HTML on request.

• Rapid Home Provisioning of Oracle Software

  Rapid Home Provisioning enables you to create clusters, and provision, patch, and upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database homes. You can also provision applications and middleware using Rapid Home Provisioning.

  See Also:

  About Deploying Oracle Databases Using Rapid Home Provisioning

• Oracle Real Application Clusters Reader Nodes

  Oracle RAC Reader Nodes facilitate Oracle Flex Cluster architecture by allocating a set of read/write instances running Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workloads and a set of read-only database instances across Hub Nodes and Leaf Nodes in the cluster. In this architecture, updates to the read/write instances are immediately propagated to the read-only instances on the Leaf Nodes, where they can be used for online reporting or instantaneous queries.

  See Also:

  Oracle Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide

• Service-Oriented Buffer Cache Access

  Cluster-managed services are used to allocate workloads across various Oracle RAC database instances running in a cluster. These services are used to access database objects cached in the buffer caches of the respective database instances. Service-oriented buffer cache access optimization allows Oracle RAC to cache or pre-warm instances with data blocks for objects accessed through a service. This feature improves access time of Oracle RAC Database instances.

  See Also:

  Oracle Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide

• Server Weight-Based Node Eviction

  Server weight-based node eviction acts as a tie-breaker mechanism in situations where Oracle Clusterware needs to evict a particular node or a group of nodes from a cluster, in which all nodes represent an equal choice for eviction. The server weight-based node eviction mechanism helps to identify the node or the group of nodes to be evicted based on additional information about the load on those servers. Two principle mechanisms, a system inherent automatic mechanism and a user input-based mechanism exist to provide respective guidance.

  See Also:

  Oracle Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide

• Load-Aware Resource Placement

  Load-aware resource placement prevents overloading a server with more applications than the server is capable of running. The metrics used to determine whether an application can be started on a given server, either as part of the startup or as a result of a failover, are based on the anticipated resource consumption of the application as well as the capacity of the server in terms of CPU and memory.

The following feature is deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in another release. See Oracle Database Upgrade Guide for a complete list of deprecated features in this release.

• Deprecation of configToolAllCommands script

  The configToolAllCommands script runs in the response file mode to configure Oracle products after installation and uses a separate password response file. Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), the configToolAllCommands script is deprecated and is subject to desupport in a future release.

  To perform postinstallation configuration of Oracle products, you can now run the Oracle Database or Oracle Grid Infrastructure installer with the -executeConfigTools option. You can use the same response file created during installation to complete postinstallation configuration.

The following feature is desupported in this release. See Oracle Database Upgrade Guide for a complete list of features desupported in this release.

• Desupport of Direct File System Placement for Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and Voting Files

  Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2), the placement of Oracle Clusterware files: the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR), and the Voting Files, directly on a shared file system is desupported in favor of having Oracle Clusterware files managed by Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM). You cannot place Oracle Clusterware files directly on a shared file system. If you need to use a supported shared file system, either a Network File System, or a shared cluster file system instead of native disk devices, then you must create Oracle ASM disks on supported network file systems that you plan to use for hosting Oracle Clusterware files before installing Oracle Grid Infrastructure. You can then use the Oracle ASM disks in an Oracle ASM disk group to manage Oracle Clusterware files.

  If your Oracle Database files are stored on a shared file system, then you can continue to use shared file system storage for database files, instead of moving them to Oracle ASM storage.

The following features are deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in another release. See Oracle Database Upgrade Guide for a complete list of deprecated features in this release.

• Deprecation of single-letter SRVCTL command-line interface (CLI) options

  All SRVCTL commands have been enhanced to accept full-word options instead of the single-letter options. All new SRVCTL command options added in this release support full-word options, only, and do not have single-letter equivalents. The use of single-letter options with SRVCTL commands might be desupported in a future release.

• Change for Standalone Deinstallation Tool

  The deinstallation tool is now integrated with the database installation media.

• Deprecation of -cleanupOBase

  The -cleanupOBase flag of the deinstallation tool is deprecated in this release. There is no replacement for this flag.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control is replaced by Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Express.

• The deinstall standalone utility is replaced with a deinstall option using Oracle Universal Installer (OUI).

The following features are no longer supported by Oracle. See Oracle Database Upgrade Guide for a complete list of features desupported in this release.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control

• CLEANUP_ORACLE_BASE property removed and does not support an Oracle base removal during silent or response file mode deinstalls.