It took a while into 2021 – but now Oracle Database 21c is available for download on Linux.
Download Location
Please go to either oracle.com or edelivery:
- https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/oracle-database-software-downloads.html
- https://edelivery.oracle.com
On edelivery you need to search for “Oracle Database”:
On oracle.com you need to scroll down a bit:
Other OS Ports
As you can see in MOS Note: 742060.1 – Release Schedule of Current Database Releases – Table 2, Oracle Database 21c will be available on Linux x86-64, Microsoft Windows x64 and HP-UX Itanium. It won’t be available on SPARC or Intel Solaris, neither will it be available on IBM AIX or zLinux.
Support Status
Please be aware that Oracle 21c is an Innovation Release only. This means, you won’t get Extended Support for it. The Long Term Release right now with optional Extended Support is still Oracle Database 19c.
Please see MOS Note: 742060.1 – Release Schedule of Current Database Releases for further details.
Oracle Database 21c will get Premier Support until end of April 2024.
New Features
You will find several new features in Oracle Database 21c such as Blockchain Tables, Native JSON Datatype, Oracle Machine Learning for Python, SQL Macros, and Javascript execution inside the Oracle Database.
Please see the Learning Database New Features Guide for Oracle 21c for further details.
–Mike
unfortunately i have server Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.10 (Santiago) and 7
i believe from RHEL 8 onwards 21c is certified, please correct me if i am wrong
I added the certification information to the blog post.
Cheers,
Mike
Thank you Mike for all that you do for the community. I am your big fan.
Thanks a lot for the feedback 🙂 🙂 🙂
Cheers,
Mike
Hi Mike,
Does it mean that 19c was the last release on Solaris SPARC? Did I miss a platform desupport notice?
regards,
Andreas
Hi Andreas,
no, SPARC isn’t desupported. But there won’t be an 21c release for SPARC which isn’t a bigger issue I guess for most people. With the next Long Term Support release, you will get SPARC as well.
Cheers,
Mike
Another very strange decission. No 20c on premises and now no 21c on SPARC zLinux AIX? We are AIX only house (for OracleDB). Sure, we will upgrade mainly to next LTS versiom, as we have 95% of OracleDB in 19c version. But we would like to deploy new 4-5 instances as we need full JSON native support, we would also need support for react programming (async JDBC dstabase calls). It seems we will have to deploy new MongoDB instances instead of Oracle. So oracle will loose market again.
And I comoletely do not understand why obviously dying platform HPUX will get 21c. Maybe Oracle need to face another court affair.
Hi Pavel,
actually you shouldn’t worry at first that there is no 20c – this was mostly due to Covid. And it would have been an innovation release, too, with a very short support time frame. You wouldn’t have upgraded to it.
And you certainly could use 21c (but not on AIX and SPARC). You just need to be aware that you’ll have to upgrade again before end of April 2024.
I see your points with 21c and AIX and SPARC. Are you really developing on AIX, SPARC and zLinux? I haven’t seen many shops developing on these platforms lately.
Regarding HP … well, your assumption may be correct potentially …
Cheers,
Mike
Hi,
we have 400 AIX LPARS with maybe 550 oracle databases ( productional are 60 lpars with 80 databases). On Linux/VMWARE we have only applications. So back to your question, sure we are developing on AIX. We still can observe demand for 3-4 new databases instances for new projects.
I also know few zLinux only shops. SPARC – tyis is maybe the only one up to oracle, oracle should know what are their SPARC customers doing. I do not know much companies using it, they have definitely lost the fight against IBM
Hi Pavol,
no, we haven’t lost the fight 🙂
But to be frank again, you will have enough time to switch from 19c to the next long term support release (most likely 23c).
Trust us a bit – we hear you customers.
But I can’t think of many features which aren’t backported to 19c which require 21c now.
Cheers,
Mike
You may want to check the download currently available closely. The home installs without problems however when you attempt to create a database with dbca the OUI (of course) complains about permissions on oradism (not being root owned and 4750). The permissions are correct however when you look deeper the documentation says unset sga_max to get around the problem but that does not work either. The attempt was on an OL8 latest that runs 12c and 19c. Permissions for oradism are set by root.sh so they should be correct for dbca is my thought.
Thanks Terence – as I’m still on OL7, I haven’t seen this.
But to be frank, there is simply zero reason unless you are om VMS or SPARC to have SGA_MAX_TARGET. Use SGA_TARGET, that is fully fine.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike,
Unfortunately, this still does not work with SGA_TARGET set and sga_max_target unset and even with the OCT 2021 patch applied we still get the ORA-12791 complaining the oradism permissions are wrong when in fact they are correct as set by root.sh.
Hi Terrence,
then only an SR will help – but I guess you might have opened one already.
Cheers,
Mike
Hi,
Yes of course, we are developing heavily on AIX. I have seen also few zLinux houses developing there heavily, LinuxOne is more and more interesting for bigger companies.
We have maybe 400 lpars with 500 oracle DBs, 70-80 of them is productional, rest is UAT, DEV… We deploy 3-4 databases per year in PROD for new projects. For some of them even 21c would be interesting, as I wrote in previous post.
Hi Pavol,
yes, but please use 19c – and then later 23c. There will be enough time to switch from one long term support release to another for sure.
Cheers,
Mike