John Watson's blog

As from this weekend, it is here:

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/oracle21c-linux-downloads.html

I'll certainly install it in the next few days, there are a few features I want to experiment with and I know our developers want to check out the new JSON features. Production use? I'm not sure. It being an "innovation" release only with no extended support makes me a bit dubious.

ORDS version 21 was released in May, I had it tested and rolled it out in June. But once live, a problem popped up: numerous executions of this statement,
SELECT COUNT(1) FROM SYS.ALL_SYNONYMS WHERE OWNER = 'PUBLIC' AND SYNONYM_NAME = 'APEX_RELEASE' AND TABLE_NAME = 'APEX_RELEASE';

What block size should you use? For what purpose? How about tablespaces in different block sizes? Any opinions?

Database release 19.7 (ie, 19c with the April 2020 RU) is at last certified for OL8, but there may be some hacking needed to get it installed.

This certification is long overdue: our security admin has been pushing for the 5.x kernel for some time, and OL7 still only supports kernel 4.x. I'm starting to move some production systems over now using the July RUR, which takes the release to 19.7.1.

Begin by installing the Oracle Validated rpm from the ol8_UEKR6 repository:

yum install oracle-database-preinstall-19c

Recently I've been working on tuning some distributed queries. This is not always straightforward.

Now available!
https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/20/books.html

Going through the New Features guide, there is a shed load of wonderful enhancements. Then you look at the Licensing guide, and most of them require Exadata or Oracle Cloud or both.

Many times I've seen the question on forums "How can I move a table from one schema to another?" and the answer is always that you can't. You have to copy it. Or export/import it. Well, here's a way. It assumes that you are on release 12.x and have the partitioning option.

Oracle corporation will (as of 24 September 2019) support customers running on VMware.

A very nice licensing change in 19c: you can now have up to three PDBs in a Standard Edition Multitenant database.

Do you know about multiple domain certificates? If not you may have to learn quickly, because Oracle has changed the way they are handled in release 12.2. This is going to break a lot of applications.