Oracle recently announced that its latest generation of the world’s most popular database, Oracle Database 12c, will be available within next two weeks. With pluggable database as USP, Oracle Database 12c will enable customers to make more efficient use of their IT resources while continuing to improve their users’ service levels. The ‘C’ in Oracle Database 12c stands for pluggable database, which reportedly is a better way to achieve multitenancy for cloud applications.

We all understand the complexity of database consolidation as well its importance for business efficiency. There are several critical issues involved in consolidation process such as database workload characteristics, the ability to maintain performance service levels, and point-in-time recovery needs of different databases. So, the Oracle Database 12c with new pluggable database feature reduces the risk of consolidation as the DBA can easily plug or unplug an existing database to or from a container database, without any need of changing code in the application.

Here are some new features of Oracle Database 12c:

• Automatic Purging of Workspaces
• End User Data Upload
• Expanded Interactive Reports
• Modernized Application Builder
• Enhanced Upgrade Automation
• Increased Number of Field Sections

Besides, it offers several new capabilities like query optimization, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, and backup and recovery. To put it in simple words, Oracle Database 12c makes database consolidation simple and efficient, and hence is a true cloud database. Some of the advantages of Oracle Database 12c, as stated on Oracle’s website, are:

• Consolidating multiple databases with Oracle Multitenant
• Automatically optimizing data storage and compression according to usage patterns
• Providing continuous access with Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture
• Securing enterprise data with comprehensive defense-in-depth strategy
• Simplifying in-database analysis of Big Data
• Efficient database management using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control