Oracle 18c is coming soon

Yesterday (Jan.22, 2018) the email alert from Oracle subjected on "Oracle Support HOT Topics" had an item "Release Schedule of Current Database Releases" with last updated date on Jan 19, 2018.

When I accessed the link, it directed to the Metalink Note:742060.1.  Under the section "What's New?", you will see the following information:

• 19-Jan-2018 - added release 18 to the table

So for every release schedule table, a column for Oracle release 18 is added. From the schedule, we can get:

• Oracle 18c for Oracle Public Cloud Releases will be available at 1Q2018 (means some time within the 1st quarter of 2018). And the same release time is applied to On-Premises Engineered Systems including Oracle Database Appliance and Exadata.
• Oracle 18c for On-Premises Server (including client) will be available on H2CY2018 (means some time within second 6 months of 2018) for Linux x86-64, Solaris 64-bit (SPARC and x86), HP-UX Itanium, Windows 64-bit and IBM AIX/Linux platforms.

To help user plan ahead, Oracle also provides a roadmap of patch sets for Oracle Database major release 11.1 and beyond, "showing planned release dates and the duration of their support lives in relationship to the overall release life. The chart is by nature somewhat simplified so be sure to read the details below it to help you interpret it correctly."

The chart has been updated with Oracle 18c(was 12.2.0.2) and 19c(was 12.2.0.3).

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? (2)

As an Oracle DBA, you might think why Oracle cares so much about "CLOUD". For years, Oracle has been the No.1 RDBMS in the market.

Rank			DBMS	Database Model	Score
May 2016	Apr 2016	May 2015			May 2016	Apr 2016	May 2015
1.	1.	1.	Oracle	Relational DBMS	1462.02	-5.51	+19.93
2.	2.	2.	MySQL	Relational DBMS	1371.83	+1.72	+77.56
3.	3.	3.	Microsoft SQL Server	Relational DBMS	1142.82	+7.77	+11.79
4.	4.	4.	MongoDB	Document store	320.22	+7.78	+42.90
5.	5.	5.	PostgreSQL	Relational DBMS	307.61	+3.89	+34.09
6.	6.	6.	DB2	Relational DBMS	185.96	+1.87	-15.09
7.	8.	8.	Cassandra	Wide column store	134.50	+4.83	+27.95
8.	7.	7.	Microsoft Access	Relational DBMS	131.58	-0.39	-14.00
9.	9.	10.	Redis	Key-value store	108.24	-3.00	+13.51
10.	10.	9.	SQLite	Relational DBMS	107.26	-0.70	+2.10

Source: DB-Engines Ranking (as of May 2016)

Source: Gartner (October 2015)

However, when you scrutinize the latest company financial report (March 15, 2016), you will know why Oracle worries about its existing database business and cares more about "CLOUD".

• Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were$583 million, up 57% in U.S. dollars and up 61% in constant currency. 
• Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenues were $152 million, down 2% in U.S. dollars and up 2% in constant currency. 
• Total Cloud Revenues were $735 million, up 40% in U.S. dollars and up 44% in constant currency. 

• Total On-Premise Software Revenues were $6.3 billion, down 4% in U.S. dollars and unchanged in constant currency. 
• Total Hardware Revenues were $1.1 billion, down 13% in U.S. dollars and down 8% in constant currency. 
• Total Services Revenues were $793 million, down 7% in U.S. dollars and down 2% in constant currency.

According the report from Fortune, "as for Oracle’s third quarter, sales of new software licenses for products that run on-premises fell 11% year over year. That on-premises category makes up 70% of Oracle’s overall revenue, so there’s reason for concern there." 

Also, when you check the above Gartner Magic Quadrant figure, you will find out Gartner placed Microsoft ahead of Oracle within the LEADERS's quadrant. It is not because of the market share of RDBMS, but the result of Microsoft's recent investments in its data platform, including Azure DocumentDB, the managed NoSQL database in the cloud. Microsoft SQL Server is also popular not only on-premises but in the cloud. In May, Microsoft also announced the SQL Server will soon be available on Linux.

On the other front,  Amazon which is considered as the absolute leader of cloud computing also grabs huge database market share and is surprisingly in the LEADERS's quadrant just below Oracle. As we all know, AWS offers Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB. Last year, Amazon also launched its own database engine called Aurora as a new database service on the AWS cloud.

We don't even mention the competition from IBM (DB2) and SAP (SAP HANA) as well as other vendors like Teradata and tons of open source or NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc.).

Oracle might still have years to collect money from its traditional RDBMS product and service, but Larry has to fight in the CLOUD. It matters.