Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release is a new, free offering of the industry-leading Oracle Database that enterprises worldwide rely on every day. It can be downloaded straight from the Internet with no oracle.com user account or license click-through requirements, enabling simple and fast access to the world’s only converged database that supports all data models and workload types.

Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release is packaged for ease of use and a full-featured experience, making it the perfect entry-level database for anyone who wants to build and run data-driven apps. Its built-in upward compatibility with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and Oracle Database cloud services ensures that users can move to any other Oracle Database offering anytime.

Also offering Always Free Autonomous Database, Oracle remains the only vendor to provide a converged database platform both in the cloud and on-premises, entirely free-of-charge.

Putting developers first

“Developers are the most important constituency in tech decision making today. Therefore getting tools into their hands with a minimum of friction is more important than ever. Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release is designed to remove obstacles to developer access, allowing devs to define the ecosystem without requiring permission. This is a radical departure for Oracle,” said James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk.

Responding to the demand from developers worldwide for access to the newest features of its next-generation converged database, Oracle is, for the first time ever, releasing the next version of the Oracle Database to the developer community first, with Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release.

Developers now have a head-start to build new applications and enhance existing ones with innovative 23c features that simplify development of modern data-driven apps. The entire  feature set of Oracle Database 23c is planned to be generally available within the next 12 months.

Available as Docker Image, VirtualBox VM, and Linux RPM installation file, Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release includes groundbreaking new features such as:

• JSON Relational Duality: Developers can build applications in either relational or JSON paradigms with a single source of truth and benefit from the strengths of both, relational and document models. Data is held once but can be accessed, written, and modified with either approach. Developers benefit from the best of both JSON and relational models, including ACID-compliant transactions and concurrency controls, which means they no longer have to make tradeoffs between complex object-relational mappings or data inconsistency issues.

“With Oracle Database 23c Free—Developer Release, developers get early access to new app dev features highlighted by JSON Relational Duality. This release finally gives developers an opportunity to try out a feature that unifies and synchronizes the documents and relational worlds. It enables developers and data engineers to access formats for each use case without worrying about data structure, data mapping, data consistency or performance tuning. They can now also run graph analytics on top of both relational and JSON data. Oracle’s JSON Relational Duality, a truly revolutionary solution, is perhaps one of the most important innovations in information science in 20 years,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC.

• JavaScript Stored Procedures (powered by GraalVM): JavaScript code can now be executed closer to data than ever before by writing JavaScript Stored Procedures or loading existing JavaScript libraries into the Oracle Database. Support for JavaScript code improves developer productivity by allowing reuse of existing business logic straight inside the data tier and reuse of JavaScript developer skills. JavaScript code invocation can be intermixed with SQL and PL/SQL, providing polyglot programming language support.

• JSON Schema: Developers can now ensure and validate JSON document structures via industry-standard JSON Schemas, enabling the confident and reliable use of the JSON data format.

• Operational Property Graphs: Developers can now build both transactional and analytical property graph applications with Oracle Database, using its industry-leading, new SQL standard property graph queries support, including running graph analytics on top of relational and JSON data.

• Oracle Kafka APIs: Kafka applications can now run against Oracle Database Transactional Event Queues with minimal code changes enabling much more robust microservices built using transactional events that perform event operations and database changes in a single atomic transaction.

• SQL Domains: The new domain construct can act as lightweight type modifiers that centrally document intended data usage, extending and drastically improving SQL standard domains. This allows developers to better understand how the data is used and improves overall data quality, without the complexity and incompatibility of usage-specific data types or user-defined types.

• Annotations: Database metadata can now be stored directly alongside the data with the new Annotation mechanism inside the Oracle Database. Developers can annotate common data model attributes for tables, columns, views, indexes, etc., providing a central, lightweight, declarative facility to register and exchange usage properties across applications. Storing the metadata along with the data guarantees consistency and universal accessibility to any user or application that uses the data.

More information

• Product page: Find out more information about Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer release under https://www.oracle.com/database/free
• Download:
  • Docker Image (docker pull container-registry.oracle.com/database/free)
  • VirtualBox VM
  • Linux RPM file
• Documentation: See all the new capabilities in the New Features Guide and read more in the Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release documentation.
• User Forum: Users can exchange their experiences and ideas and ask questions at the public Oracle Database Free – Developer Release forum.