- Introduces more than 200 innovations with native blockchain tables and persistent memory support.
- New database eliminates the need for separate tooling and services by enabling organisations to run inference directly on their database, right next to their data.
Oracle adds new features to its database and makes it easier for developers to develop apps with new low-code service to stand out from the crowd.
The US technology giant has introduced more than 200 innovations to its converged autonomous database – Oracle Database 21c, including immutable blockchain tables, In-Database JavaScript, native JSON binary data type, AutoML for in-database machine learning (ML), and persistent memory store, as well as enhancements for in-memory, graph processing performance, sharding, multitenant, and security.
Unlike other vendors’ single-purpose databases in the cloud or on-premises, Oracle Database 21c provides support for multi-model, multi-workload, and multi-tenant requirements – all within a single, modern converged database engine.
“Oracle Database 21c continues our strategy of delivering the world’s most powerful converged database engine,” Andrew Mendelsohn, Executive Vice-President for database server technologies at Oracle, said.
Moreover, he said that Oracle’s converged database approach makes developers far more productive when building new applications, and makes it easy to later evolve applications to meet new business requirements.
Simplifying the process
With the launch of Database 21c, Carl Olofson, Research Vice-President, Data Management Software at research firm International Data Corporation, said that Oracle has elevated its flagship database to a new level of convergence with broad support for a wide variety of data types and workloads.
The 200 new built-in innovations elevate Oracle Database 21c to a new level of functionality, eliminating the need for specialised, isolated cloud services and tools to do those jobs, he said and added that users can avoid the compounding of costs and operational complexity that comes with each additional cloud service that organisations ordinarily use.
Mark Peters, Principal Analyst & Practice Director, ESG, said that the new database eliminates the need for separate tooling and services by enabling organisations to run inference directly on their database, right next to their data.
“This is a refreshing contrast for organisations that leverage the likes of AWS, which has more than a dozen different databases, each requiring customers to deal with different APIs, ETL approaches and data integration processes,” he said.
To sweeten its offerings, Oracle has unveiled a new low-code service – Oracle APEX – for developing and deploying data-driven enterprise applications quickly and easily.
The browser-based, low-code cloud service enables developers to create modern web apps for desktops and mobile devices using an intuitive graphical interface.
Tight integration with the database
While the original APEX platform was only available as part of the Oracle Database, APEX Application Development is available as a standalone service and works with a variety of applications.
Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the service starts at $360 per month, providing support for more than 500 users and unlimited applications, and elastically scales as additional capacity is needed.
A recent study from Pique Solutions showed that developers could build enterprise applications 38x faster with the Oracle APEX service without having to learn complex, full-stack technologies.
“Oracle continues to support developer communities and the new APEX service is the latest example, enabling citizen developers, business analysts, and professional developers to rapidly create and deploy beautiful, responsive, data-driven applications with minimal effort,” said Mendelsohn said.
He added that APEX is powerful enough to build the vast majority of business applications. “Building data-driven applications with traditional coding should now be the exception rather than the rule,” he said.
The APEX architecture provides extremely tight integration with the database, enabling a 10x reduction in round trips between the application and the database, resulting in much faster response times for end-users of data-driven applications.
“No other development platform better exploits the unique capabilities of the Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata in OCI,” he said.