Customers often aren’t too greedy to upgrade their existing databases to the latest release available. Some of the reasons are
- Upgrading costs a lot of money.
- Don’t see the benefits by migrating to a newer release.
- Still happy with the features of our current release.
- Will introduce new bugs and issues.
- We will wait for the 2nd major release.
- The application is not yet certified.
12 reasons why you should
We listed some reasons why migrating to the most recent version can be good. It’s not just about new features, also existing features get optimized. And most of all, you wouldn’t want to lose the available support.
1
Performance
Overall better performance, CLOB’s & BLOB’s are constructed much faster, automated adaptive performance tuning, in-Memory caching, Faster physical I/O via Attribute Clustering and Zone Mapping, …
2
Support cost
11.2.0.4 is currently in Waived Extended Support which ends December 2018. The extended support cost for 11g will be increased. So no new bug patches unless you are on 12c… Start planning and testing now to be in time for when the extended support ends.
3
Support of its predecessors will end soon
4
Stability
12.1.0.1 was already stable, 12.1.0.2 even more and now there is 12.2 with even more useful features!
5
Security
New / stronger authentication protocols (SHA-2 support for passwords).
One of many other new security features is unified auditing. Enabling easier analysis.
6
Scalability
Oracle Database 12c builds on the industry-leading scalability of earlier releases with parallel processing at the center of it all. Thanks to PDB’s (Pluggable DataBases) everything is even more flexible.
7
Flexibility
Patch all PDB’s in a CDB (Container DataBase) simultaneously or separate, move PDB’s around, point-in-time recovery for individual PDB’s, …
8
Functionality
New features: In-memory caching, compression and column store, moving datafiles online without blocking DML operations. The same applies to partition-level migration operations.
9
Upgradability
10.2 and newer will be able to upgrade directly to 12c.
10
Data Management
A completely new information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. It uses heat maps to determine which data users constantly access for DML, access just for reporting, or hardly ever access altogether.
11
Packaged Applications
11.2.0.4 is now on extended support, which means more and more software products do not longer receive support on 11g.
12
We believe in Oracle Database 12c
Enough said?