New Feature Announcements

Announcements for the noteworthy changes made to Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure.

Related Topics

April 2024

Feature Description
View and manage customer contacts for operational issues and announcements.

When customer contacts are set, Oracle sends announcements, operational notifications, and unplanned maintenance notifications to the specified email addresses.

You can add email contacts while provisioning Autonomous Databases. You can also view and modify customer contacts for an existing Autonomous Database using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console.

See Manage Customer Contacts for more information.

Ability to provision an Autonomous Container Database using the Oracle Database software version of an Autonomous Database software image .

You can choose the latest Oracle Database software version, its immediate predecessor, or a custom database software image as the Container Database software version while provisioning an Autonomous Container Database.

See Create an Autonomous Container Database for instructions.

Ability to create Autonomous Database software images.

You can create Autonomous Database software images and use them as standard images for provisioning Autonomous Container Databases.

See Create an Autonomous Database software image for instructions.

Ability to view and copy a list of one-off patches available for an Autonomous Container Database.

You can view and copy a list of one-off patches from the Autonomous Container Database Details page.

See Service Maintenance of Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure for more details.

Ability to skip maintenance updates for a quarter.

You can customize your service maintenance preferences to skip patching a Release Update (RU) for one quarter. You cannot skip the maintenance updates for two consecutive quarters.

See Update Autonomous Container Database Maintenance Preferences for more details.

Use DBMS_CLOUD_PIPELINE to create data pipelines for loading and exporting data in the cloud.

You can use DBMS_CLOUD_PIPELINE to create data pipelines for loading and exporting data in the cloud. This package supports continuous incremental data load of files in object store into the database, as well as continuous incremental export of table data or query results from the database to object store based on a timestamp column.

See DBMS_CLOUD_PIPELINE Package for more information.

Use DBMS_CLOUD_REPO to use and manage cloud hosted code repositories from Oracle Database.

You can use DBMS_CLOUD_REPO to use and manage cloud hosted code repositories from Oracle Database. This package is a single interface for access to Multicloud Code repositories and allows you to upload SQL files to Git repositories or install SQL scripts directly from Cloud Code Repositories. This package also allows you to use a Cloud Code Repository to manage code versions for SQL scripts and to install or patch application code from Git repositories.

Supported code repositories include GitHub, AWS CodeCommit, and Azure Repos.

See About DBMS_CLOUD_REPO for more information.

Doc update: Steps to configure Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure.

Our documentation is updated with a use case driven article that guides you through configuring Autonomous Database resources on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure.

This use case is designed to leverage different capabilities of Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure in an efficient way.

See Use Case: Configure Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure.

Connect to Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure without a wallet.

You can connect your database applications or tools to an Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure without a wallet. Connecting an application without a wallet (TLS) provides security for authentication and encryption, and security is enforced using a security certificate that is trusted by the client operating system (OS).

See Prepare for TLS Walletless Connections for more information.

Bulk operations for files in the Cloud.

The PL/SQL package DBMS_CLOUD offers parallel execution support for bulk file upload, download, copy, and transfer activities, which streamlines the user experience and delivers optimal performance for bulk file operations.

Refer to the following articles for more information:
Create a text index on the Object Storage files.

You can create a text index on the Object Storage files specified at the location_uri location with the DBMS_CLOUD. CREATE_EXTERNAL_TEXT_INDEX procedure. The index is refreshed at regular intervals, for any new additions or deletions done with files on location URI.

See CREATE_EXTERNAL_TEXT_INDEX and DROP_EXTERNAL_TEXT_INDEX for reference.

March 2024

Feature Description
Doc update: Overview of an Autonomous Container Database (ACD)

Our documentation has been updated with a new article to provide a complete overview of Autonomous Container Database resources. This article answers all questions about Autonomous Container Databases, including what an ACD is, the requirements for creating an ACD, which database features can be defined or managed using the ACD resource, and provides related documentation to help you create and manage ACDs.

See About Autonomous Container Database.

Free developer database instances

Customers who have subscribed to Oracle Exadata Database Service or Autonomous Database on either Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure or Exadata Cloud@Customer can create and use Autonomous Database for Developers instances.

Autonomous Database for Developers instances are free Autonomous Databases that developers can use to build and test new applications.

With Autonomous Database for Developers instances, you can try new Autonomous Database features for free and apply them to ongoing or new development projects. Developer database comes with limited resources and is, therefore, not suitable for large-scale testing and production deployments. When you need more compute or storage resources, you can transition to a paid database licensing by cloning your developer database into a regular Autonomous Database.

Refer to Autonomous Database for Developers for more details.

Shared Server configuration for Autonomous Database applications

Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure supports Shared Server Configuration for maintaining legacy applications designed without connection pooling. You can enable shared server configuration while provisioning an Autonomous Container Database.

For more details, see the Shared Server Configuration section in Special-Purpose Connection Features.

Autonomous Database resource management

Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure lets you configure the following attributes to a value that is most appropriate for your database while provisioning an Autonomous Container Database (ACD):

  • Database split threshold (CPU)
  • Node failover reservation (%)
  • Distribution affinity

This capability improves your resource management ability to either consolidate more databases or have the highest database availability.

See Create an Autonomous Container Database for more details.

Export data using DBMS_CLOUD.EXPORT_DATA

You can use the DBMS_CLOUD.EXPORT_DATA procedure to export data from an Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure to a directory or cloud Object Store. The export options are CSV, JSON, or XML.

See the following pages for more details:

February 2024

Feature Description
Enable Autonomous Data Guard and add a standby database on an Autonomous Container Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer deployments.

On Exadata Cloud@Customer deployments, you can enable Autonomous Data Guard and add a standby Autonomous Container Database (ACD) to ACDs provisioned already.

For more information, see Enable Autonomous Data Guard on an Autonomous Container Database.

Use Select AI to generate SQL from Natural Language Prompts.

Autonomous Database can interact with AI service providers including: OpenAI and CohereAI to provide access to Generative AI capability from Oracle Database that uses Large Language Models (LLMs). One way LLMs can work with Oracle Database is by generating SQL from natural language prompts that allow you to talk to your database.

See Use Select AI to Generate SQL from Natural Language Prompts for more information.

To get a list of AI profiles and their attributes created in your Autonomous Database or schema, you can use the DBMS_CLOUD_AI views.

See DBMS_CLOUD_AI Views for more information.

Send Microsoft Teams notifications from Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure on Exadata Cloud@Customer deployments.

On Exadata Cloud@Customer deployments, you have the capability to send messages, alerts, or the output of a query from Autonomous Database to a Microsoft Teams Channel.

See Send Microsoft Teams Notifications from Autonomous Database for more information.

Send Slack notifications from Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure on Exadata Cloud@Customer deployments.

On Exadata Cloud@Customer deployments, you have the capability to send Slack notifications from Autonomous Database. This feature enables you to send messages to a Slack channel or share the results of a query to a Slack channel.

See Send Slack Notifications from Autonomous Database for more information.

Rolling rotation of database SSL certificates.

With the rolling rotation of database SSL certificates, your existing database SSL certificate is not invalidated immediately after rotating it.

Within two weeks from the certificate rotation, you can connect to your databases using the Autonomous Database client wallet you downloaded before or after the certificate rotation.

After two weeks from the certificate rotation:

  • The database wallet downloaded before the certificate rotation is invalidated and can not be used to connect to your databases.
  • The database wallet downloaded within two weeks from the certificate rotation remains active and can be used to connect to your databases.
  • Any new database wallet downloaded after two weeks from the certificate rotation can be used to connect to your databases.

Refer to Certificate Management for complete details.

New events for Autonomous Container Databases.

You can get notified when your Autonomous Container Database's backup destination uses 80% of the storage space, runs out of storage space, has incorrect permissions set, or returns to a healthy state.

To subscribe to event notifications, see Use Events and Notifications to Watch Resource Activity.

Refer to Events for Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure for a complete list of events emitted by the Autonomous Database resources.

January 2024

Feature Description
Send email using DBMS_CLOUD_NOTIFICATION from Autonomous Databases deployed on Oracle Public Cloud.

On Oracle Public Cloud, you can use the DBMS_CLOUD_NOTIFICATION procedures to send messages and query results as email.

See Send Email on Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure for more information.

Send Microsoft Teams notifications from Autonomous Databases deployed on Oracle Public Cloud.

On Oracle Public Cloud, you have the capability to send messages, alerts, or query results from an Autonomous Database to a Microsoft Teams Channel.

See Send Microsoft Teams Notifications from Autonomous Database for more information.

Send Slack notifications from Autonomous Databases deployed on Oracle Public Cloud.

On Oracle Public Cloud deployments, you have the capability to send Slack notifications from an Autonomous Database. This feature enables you to send messages or share the results of a query to a Slack channel.

See Send Slack Notifications from Autonomous Database for more information.