Oracle Database 23c with new features for app development
Oracle has announced the availability of a new free database version under the full, somewhat cumbersome name “Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release”. As a special feature, the company emphasizes that developers with DB 23c are the first to have access to new functions for app development, which particularly stand out due to JSON Relational Duality.
Download database even without an Oracle user account
In a blog entry, Gerald Venzl, Senior Director of Product Manager at Oracle, repeatedly emphasizes that his company is responding to repeated requests from many developers who want a free version of the database. In addition, according to him, it is a first that Oracle is making the database version available to the developer community first.
With the Cloud Free Tier project, the company had previously offered the opportunity to use the software freely in the cloud. According to the manager, developers can now download the new version 23c directly from the Internet without the need for a user account on Oracle’s website or “a click-through license”.
Free choice: JSON or relational
The database, the complete feature set of which will only become generally available in the next 12 months, is already available for direct download as a Docker image, virtual machine for VirtualBox and as a Linux RPM installation file.
The development team emphasizes the JSON relational duality as one of the particularly important features for app development. This feature aims to enable developers to create applications in both the relational and JSON paradigms with a single point of truth, in order to benefit from the strengths of both models, the relational and the document model. Data is stored once, but can be accessed, written, and modified using either approach. This should then also include ACID-compliant transactions and concurrency controls, so that development teams no longer have to make compromises between complex object-relational mappings or data inconsistency problems.
Another innovation are the JavaScript Stored Procedures, which are supported by the GraalVM. They now allow developers to run JavaScript code closer to the data by writing JavaScript stored procedures or loading existing JavaScript libraries into the Oracle database.
More detailed information about the new features and possibilities can be found in the blog entry or on the product page of the database.
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