By Andrew Mendelsohn, SVP,  Database Server Technologies

As organizations evolve their products, business models, and processes to keep pace with today’s dynamic global marketplace, Oracle is offering a powerful new database that’s optimized for cloud computing and Big Data, helping CIOs cut costs through consolidation and simplified management. Available for download from the Oracle Technology Network, Oracle Database 12c features a new architecture that allows customers to consolidate many databases into a single multitenant container database in the cloud that’s 5X more scalable than traditional databases.

Built expressly to help our customers extend their workloads from the traditional on-premise model into either public clouds or private clouds, Oracle Database 12c offers more than 500 new features to meet today’s information-intensive environments; including enhancements to help customers exploit emerging opportunities in Big Data and business analytics.

Oracle Database 12c will help simplify the creation of private clouds, allow SaaS vendors to greatly enhance the level of functionality and security offered to customers, and serve as the foundation for Oracle’s extensive set of public cloud services.

The innovations in Oracle Database 12c were developed with our customers’ cloud requirements very much in mind. The new multitenant architecture makes it easier for customers to consolidate their databases and securely manage many as one. Plus, it offers customers other cloud computing capabilities such as simplified provisioning, cloning, and resource prioritization without having to make changes to applications.

Those enhancements are made possible through the use of the new multitenant architecture in Oracle Database 12c, which allows customers to simply plug in their existing databases to a shared container database without application change. As a result, customers get all of the advantages of a new database optimized for cloud computing without having to rip or replace existing apps and simultaneously disrupt the processes managed by those apps.

In addition, recent reports of rampant hacking exploits at the corporate level and a rise in potentially devastating cyberattacks underscore the paramount importance of bullet-proof security at the database level. And over its 5-year development, Oracle Database12c was created with security as an absolute top priority whether on premise, in the cloud, or a combination of the two.

Well-Mannered Deployment

Oracle Database 12c incorporates more security innovations than any other previous Oracle database.  These security innovations can help customers confidently address escalating security threats while also meeting and complying with increasingly strict privacy requirements that countries around the world are establishing.

Another first for enterprise databases, Oracle Database 12c introduces native SQL pattern matching, offering effortless analysis of business events, from click stream analysis to fraud detection.  This extends Oracle’s Big Data solution to enterprise data with intuitive, fast SQL analytics.

Carl Olofson, Research Vice-President for Database Management and Data Integration software research at IDC, cited several ways in which the new multitenant architecture will drive significant business value for customers versus what traditional databases can offer.  “Oracle Database 12c sets up the data center well for any move in the direction of cloud computing,” he said.

“A key challenge facing enterprise data-center managers today is the cost, complexity, and inflexibility represented by the large number of production databases operating in fixed server configurations, most of which are substantially underutilized,” Olofson added.

“Oracle Database 12c, with its multitenant architecture, offers an elegant solution to this problem that not only enables deployment flexibility and eases the administration of multiple databases, but does so in a way the requires neither changes to applications nor a steep learning curve for DBAs,” Olofson said.

Michelle Malcher, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, said: “Oracle’s user group communities actively participated in the development and testing of Oracle Database 12c. We are delighted to see across-the-board enhancements, and the new multitenant architecture will make it so much easier for customers to consolidate their databases onto the cloud.”

Credit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2013/07/01/oracle-database-12c-runs-the-cloud/