More than 5 years after the initial announcement, it looks like Oracle is finally moving forward with its plans to move everything to pluggable databases. In July 2014, Oracle announced that non-CDB databases may be deprecated and unsupported in the future. At OpenWorld 2019, it looks like that will be the case with Oracle Database 20c and beyond.
I know many of our customers are still running on non-CDB databases, but this announcement isn’t cause for panic. Oracle Database 19c does support non-CDB architecture and will be patched under Premier Support until April 2023, so there is plenty of time to plan that architectural change.
Additionally, Oracle delivered a bit of good licensing news with this announcement: multitenant is available at no additional cost for Standard Edition 2 and Enterprise Edition for up to three user pluggable databases! For people interested in consolidation or maximizing those precious CPU cycles for database activity, this is a great new option to have. (But don’t go deploying and leveraging multitenancy just yet! We still need to see a formal update besides the Oracle 19c licensing documentation.)
If you have questions about this news or what to understand how to leverage these changes for your organization, we’re here to help.