3 PDBs included with Oracle 19c and desupport of non-CDBs with 21c

It’s Oracle Open World week in San Francisco. and it is time for announcements of course.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

What has been announced?

Today at OOW 2019, Jenny Tsai-Smith and Dominic Giles announced in their talk that the non-CDB architecture will be desupported from Oracle 21c on. But VERY IMPORTANT, from Oracle 19c on you can have 3 user-created pluggable databases of any type without a Multitenant license. As soon as you have need for 4 or more PDBs within one container database, you will need a Multitenant license.

License Guide

You can find the update regarding 3 PDBs already in the Oracle 19c License Guide:

• https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/dblic/Licensing-Information.html#GUID-0F9EB85D-4610-4EDF-89C2-4916A0E7AC87
  

This makes moving to the CDB architecture much more attractive.

Just to be clear (as the headline of the post already tells you):
This is valid from Oracle 19c on, and does not apply to previous releases such as 18c or 12.1.0.2.

And in addition, I personally would recommend to set the parameter MAX_PDBS=3 if you don’t have a Multitenant license yet.

Clarification:
As there were questions whether the PDB$SEED would count as one of the 3 PDBs, we clarified the license guide as you can see in my updated screenshot above. It says now “3 user-created PDBs”.

Desupport of the non-CDB architecture

You won’t find this information in the Oracle 19c documentation. It will appear most likely in the Oracle 21c docs. But there were pictures taken in Jenny’s and Dominic‘s talk.

–Mike