The following features are new in this release:

• Application Continuity for Planned Database Maintenance

  This feature hides scheduled maintenance operations that are required for the underlying infrastructure (Oracle Database, Oracle Grid Infrastructure, operating system and hardware) without placing a burden on application developers. This feature enables you to conduct scheduled maintenance without interruption to most application work.

  See Managing Planned Maintenance Without User Interruption.

• Application Continuity for OCI Applications

  Application Continuity is an application-independent feature that attempts to recover incomplete requests from an application perspective and masks many system, communication and hardware failures, and storage outages from the user. Application Continuity is supported when used with OCI Session pools, Tuxedo, the JDBC Replay data source or OCI driver (when you add request boundaries with your own connection pool) and OCI-based applications such as SQL*Plus.

  See Preparing to Use Application Continuity.

• Application Continuity Support for ODP .NET Unmanaged Driver

  Application Continuity recovers incomplete requests from an ODP.NET Unmanaged Driver perspective and masks many system failures, communication failures, hardware failures, and storage outages from the user. Application Continuity ensures that transactions are executed no more than once. When failures do occur, they are generally masked from the user. This feature leads to improved user experience, higher application availability, and improved ODP.NET developer productivity.

  See Preparing to Use Application Continuity.

• Automatic Configuration of Oracle ASM Filter Driver (Oracle ASMFD)

  Oracle ASMFD simplifies the configuration and management of disk devices by eliminating the need to rebind disk devices used with Oracle ASM each time the system is restarted. The configuration for Oracle ASMFD can now be enabled with a check box to be an automated process during Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation.

  See Installing Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a New Cluster.

• Cluster Health Advisor

  The Cluster Health Advisor provides system administrators and database administrators early warning of pending performance issues and root causes and corrective actions for Oracle RAC databases and cluster nodes. This advanced proactive diagnostic capability increases availability and performance management.

  See Cluster Health Advisor.

• Java APIs for FAN Events (UP, DOWN and Load Balancing Advisory Events)

  The Oracle Fast Application Notification (FAN) library (simplefan.jar) is enhanced with the capability to identify UP events. The oracle.simplefan.FanUpEventListener interface is enhanced with two methods, NodeUpEvent() and ServiceUpEvent().  ServiceDownEvent, LoadAdvisoryEvent, and NodeDownEvent were added in a previous release. Java containers, frameworks, and applications looking to handle FAN events can use these APIs to subscribe to Oracle Database RAC FAN events for building high availability solutions.

  See Oracle Database RAC FAN Events Java API Reference.

• JDBC Driver Support for Fast Application Notification (FAN)

  The Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver now supports Oracle Database RAC FAN events for enhanced support for planned maintenance and unplanned down times:

  • oracle.jdbc.fanEnabled:  A system property to enable or disable the FAN support in the driver.  If Oracle Universal Connection Pool (UCP) is used as a client-side pool, then UCP takes the precedence.

  • oracle.jdbc.fanONSConfig: A connection property to be used by the driver as remote Oracle Notification Services (ONS) configuration. This property is required only for the pre-12c database versions.

  See Configuring Application Clients for High Availability.

• Provisioning of Oracle Grid Infrastructure Homes

  Oracle Database 12c release 2 (12.2) supports provisioning, patching, and upgrade of Grid Infrastructure homes using Rapid Home Provisioning.

  See Rapid Home Provisioning, Patching, and Upgrading.

• 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.

  See About Operating System Users and Groups.

• Support for IPv6 Based IP Addresses for the Oracle Cluster Interconnect

  Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c release 2 (12.2), you can use either IPv4 or IPv6 based IP addresses to configure cluster nodes on the private network. You can use more than one private network for the cluster.

• Zip Image based Grid Infrastructure Installation

  Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c release 2 (12.2), the installation media is replaced with a zip file for the Oracle Grid Infrastructure installer. Run the installation wizard after extracting the zip file into the target home path.

  See Installing Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a New Cluster.

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 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 deprecated in favor of having Oracle Clusterware files managed by Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM). Placing Oracle Clusterware files directly on a shared file system may be subject to desupport in future releases. If you need to use a supported shared file system, either a Network File System, or a shared cluster file system instead of native disks devices, then you must create Oracle ASM disks on the shared 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.

• 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.

  See Oracle Real Application Clusters Installation Guide for Linux and UNIX.

Some features previously described in this document are desupported in Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2). See Oracle Database Upgrade Guide for a list of desupported features.

The following features are new in this release:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Express replaces Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control (DB Control)

  In previous Oracle Database releases, DB Control was the primary database management tool described in this manual. DB Control is not included in this release.

  See Oracle Database 2 Day DBA.

• Oracle Home User Support for Oracle Database

  Starting with Oracle Database 12c release 1 (12.1), Oracle Database supports the use of an Oracle Home User, which can be specified at installation time. The Oracle Home User can be a Built-in Account or a Windows User Account. If you specify a Windows User Account, then the user should be a low privileged (non-Administrator) account to ensure that the Oracle Home User has a limited set of privileges. Using an Oracle Home User ensures that Oracle Database services have only those privileges required to run Oracle products.

  See Oracle Database Platform Guide for Microsoft Windows.

• Application Continuity

  Application Continuity attempts to mask outages from end users and applications by recovering requests following recoverable outages, unplanned and planned. Application Continuity performs this recovery beneath the application so that the outage appears to the application as a delayed execution. Application Continuity masks recoverable outages - those in which requests would succeed if they were reissued. Examples include system failures, network disconnects, foreground failures, and storage failures.

  See Oracle Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide.

• Transaction Guard

  Before Oracle Database 12c release 1 (12.1), it was difficult for a database application to recover after an outage, because the commit message that Oracle Database (the server) returned to the application (the client) was not persistent. If the connection between Oracle Database and the application broke or if the database session became unavailable, then the application received a disconnection error message. After an outage, if an application user resubmitted an in-flight transaction that had been committed, then duplicate transactions resulted.

  The Oracle Database feature Transaction Guard ensures that each transaction executes at most once. Its PL/SQL interface, the DBMS_APP_CONT.GET_LTXID_OUTCOME procedure, enables an application to determine the outcome of the in-flight transaction after an outage and then recover any work that was lost due to the outage.

  See Oracle Database Development Guide.

• Java and JDBC Support for Application Continuity

  Application Continuity for Java is available with Oracle Database, JDBC Thin driver, and the Oracle connection pools: UCP (Universal Connection Pool) and WebLogic Server Active GridLink.

  Application Continuity is transparent for Java EE and Java SE applications that use Oracle JDBC, use Oracle connection pools (UCP or WLS Active GridLink), and do not have external actions. For applications with external actions (for example, using autonomous transactions or using UTL_HTTP to issue an SOA call), Application Continuity is transparent only if the application's correctness is preserved when these external actions are replayed after a failure.

  See Oracle Database JDBC Developer’s Guide.

• Oracle JDBC Support for Transaction Guard

  See Oracle Database JDBC Developer’s Guide.

Some features previously described in this document are desupported in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1). See Oracle Database Upgrade Guide for a list of desupported features.