The following are the new features in Oracle Net Services:

• Read-only Oracle Home Support

  An Oracle home can be configured in a read-only mode, which prevents creation or modification of files inside the Oracle home (ORACLE_HOME) directory. A read-only Oracle home can be used as a software image that can be shared across multiple independent servers. This simplifies patching and mass rollout as only one Oracle home image needs to be updated to distribute a patch to multiple servers. In the read-only Oracle home mode, ORACLE_BASE_HOME is a home-specific directory located at ORACLE_BASE/homes/HOME_NAME.

  See Also:

  Configuring Read-Only Oracle Homes

• Support for Oracle Connection Manager in Traffic Director Mode

  Starting with Oracle Database release 18c, Oracle Connection Manager in Traffic Director Mode is a proxy that is placed between the database clients and the database instances. This feature provides improved high availability and performance for both planned and unplanned outages with the help of new cman.ora parameters. Some of the existing parameters that support Oracle Connection Manager in Traffic Director Mode are inbound_connect_timeout, min_gateway_processes, max_gateway_processes, and max_connections. Additional parameters must be specified in the cman.ora configuration file to configure Oracle Connection Manager in Traffic Director Mode.

  The client applications must be Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP) aware. This means enabling DRCP in connect string or in tnsnames.ora alias. These applications can be supported with Oracle Connection Manager in Traffic Director Mode for failover, multiplexing, data dependent routing, and offloading operations that involve routing calls over different sessions.

  See Also:

  • Configuring Oracle Connection Manager in Traffic Director Mode

  • Oracle Connection Manager in Traffic Director Mode Parameters

• New Initialization Parameter for Service Registration

  Starting with Oracle Database release 18c, a new initialization parameter, FORWARD_LISTENER is introduced for service registration. It specifies the name of a listener to which a connection must be forwarded by an existing set of remote listeners.

  See Also:

  Setting Initialization Parameters for Service Registration

Deprecated Features for Oracle Database 18c Release 1 (18.1).

The following feature is deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in a future release:

• The Oracle Net Services support for Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) is deprecated. Oracle recommends that you use TCP as an alternative.

The following are the new features in Oracle Net Services:

• Listener Parameter for Multiple Redirects

  Starting with Oracle Database 12c release 2 (12.2), Oracle Net listener supports multiple redirects with the introduction of a new listener parameter, ALLOW_MULTIPLE_REDIRECTS_listener_name. It supports seamless migration of a PDB from a local database to the Oracle Public Cloud.

  See Also:

  • Understanding Listener Redirects

  • ALLOW_MULTIPLE_REDIRECTS_listener_name in Oracle Database Net Services Reference

• Sharding and Data Dependent Routing

  This feature provides the ability to horizontally partition the data across multiple independent Oracle databases, also called shards, and based on a key specified in the connect string, route the database requests to a particular shard.

  See Also:

  • CONNECT_DATA section in Oracle Database Net Services Reference for information about the new parameters

  • About Data-Dependent Routing

  • Oracle Data Provider for .NET Developer's Guide for Microsoft Windows for more information about this feature

• SCAN Listener Support for HTTP

  This feature enables load balancing across the HTTP presentation handlers residing on different nodes by redirecting to the least loaded node.

• ExaDirect SQL*Net Adapter

  Use the ExaDirect SQL*Net adapter for low overhead database access. Use the new transport to improve latency and throughput by leveraging Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) in an InfiniBand environment.

• Direct SQL*Net Access Over Oracle Cloud

  This feature enables Oracle Cloud support for Oracle Database over SQL*Net. The existing applications can use Oracle Cloud without any code changes.

  It allows the database clients to securely access the database public cloud service without opening an extra outbound port.

• Service-Level ACLs for TCP Protocol

  This feature allows every database service to have its own access control list (ACL) and the ACL is based on IPs. Since each pluggable database is a different service, this feature enables different pluggable databases to have different ACLs. These ACLs are enforced by the listener. In other words, access to a pluggable database service is enabled only for IPs that are permitted through an ACL.