I know that Oracle Database 18c is available in the Oracle Cloud and on Exadata engineered systems only right now. But actually I’ve had conversations with some customers who downloaded Oracle 18c on-prem software for Exadata and installed it on their systems. Therefore it may be useful to talk about Oracle Database 18c – Some important changes.

Oracle Database 18c – Some important changes

I will highlight some important changes but of course won’t cover all of them here.

Installation

You may recognize the first change after downloading the image: The installation and configuration of Oracle Database software is simplified with image-based installation. You’ll extract a zip file (db_home.zip) into the directory where you’d like your Oracle installation to be located in – and then call the runInstaller. Be aware: it sits now directly in the $ORACLE_HOME, not in the $ORACLE_HOME/oui subdirectory:

cd $ORACLE_HOME
./runInstaller

runInstaller is a script in this case. The name is kept for persistence.

Furthermore there are two other new features:

• RPM based installation in Oracle 18c
  It performs preinstall checks, extracts the database software, reassigns ownership to the preconfigured user and groups, maintains the inventory, and executes all root operations required. Works for a single-instance and client software.
• Read-Only Oracle Home in Oracle 18c
  In Oracle 18c you can configure read-only homes. In this case all the configuration data and log files reside outside the Oracle home. You can deploy it as a software image across multiple servers.Apart from the traditional ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOME directories, the following directories contain files that used to be in ORACLE_HOME: ORACLE_BASE_HOME and ORACLE_BASE_CONFIG

And interesting thing happens if you call the installer kept for internal purposes in $ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin:
it will start with a different versioning, i.e. as an Oracle 12.2 OUI. The install script runInstaller is in the $ORACLE_HOME directory. And it will greet you with Oracle 18c – and not Oracle 12.2.

Oracle Streams

Yes, the deprecation of Oracle Streams has been announced in the Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 Upgrade Guide a while ago. And Oracle 18c is now the terminal release for Oracle Streams. Beginning with Oracle 19c the feature Oracle Streams won’t be supported anymore. Please note that Oracle Multitenant, regardless of Single- or Multitenant, never implemented Oracle Streams functionality.

Oracle Multimedia

Beginning with Oracle 18c Oracle Multimedia is deprecated now. In case you’d like to remove Oracle Multimedia from your database please see this blog post: Remove Oracle Multimedia. In addition, Multimedia DICOM gets desupported with Oracle 18c as well.

Please note (and thanks Felipe for asking):
The Locator will become a top level component once Oracle Multimedia gets removed and therefore not depend on Multimedia anymore. This will happen in the first release of Oracle where Multimedia does not get installed anymore by default or even removed as part of an upgrade.

Deprecated and Desupported Features  in Oracle Database 18c

Please find the full list of deprecated features in Oracle Database 18c in the Database 18c Upgrade Guide. Furthermore you’ll find a list of desupported features and parameters in Oracle Database 18c within the same book.