Oracle 23c released earlier this month

[David Sanders]

Hi folks,

For anyone interested Oracle 23c was released earlier this month.

There are a couple of interesting features but just looking over the changes it looks like it resolves some caveats that Django has to supply workarounds for:

• There's now a BOOLEAN datatype (from the tickets I've worked on this is by far the biggest pain point) quoting from the docs: "This enables you to store TRUE and FALSE values in tables and use BOOLEAN expressions in SQL statements."
• SELECT now no longer requires a FROM
• GROUP BY now supports column aliases & position numbers

I realise that we still support older versions of Oracle but perhaps at least there's some potential for fixing issues that couldn't be resolved due to the lack of bools if some version detection was put in place?

There may be a few other interesting tidbits related to Django that I've missed. Here are the updates for application developers: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/23/nfcoa/application-development.html

Cheers,
David

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Hi,

  Thanks! Also, they finally update VM: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/databaseappdev-vm.html

  We still have to wait for a compatible driver, cx_Oracle and python-oracledb don't support it yet.

Best,
Mariusz

[charettes]

Thanks for sharing the news David!

Support for true BOOLEAN type and GROUP BY position are effectively very welcome changes as they account for a few hacks. I do wonder if that's paving the way for grouping by subquery in future versions.

Best,

Simon

[David Sanders]

Looks like python-oracledb is making updates to be compatible with 23c: https://python-oracledb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/release_notes.html#oracledb-1-3-1-tbd

1.3.1 isn't released yet but the fact that updates are being made so soon is encouraging 🎉