The following features are new in this release:

• Oracle Sharding

  Oracle Sharding is a scalability and availability feature that supports distribution and replication of data across a pool of discrete Oracle databases that share no hardware or software. In this release, global service managers are used as shard directors which route connection requests to individual shards, the GDS catalog is extended to support a shard catalog which contains the metadata for the sharded database, and GDSCTL is enhanced with several new commands to facilitate the creation, monitoring, and lifecycle management of a sharded database.

  See GDSCTL Commands Used For Oracle Sharding