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A few hours ago Oracle published a blog post about the new version Oracle 21c. See Introducing Oracle Database 21c. It is again an innovation release with a couple of interesting new features and enhancements. The online Oracle Documentation library does provide a few information on this enhancements:
- Oracle Database 21c What’s New
- Oracle® Database Learning Database New Features 21c
- Oracle Database 21c Books
The study of documentation and blog posts is always interesting. But it gets much more exciting when you can do first hands-on with the new release. Thanks to the Oracle Cloud this is easily possible. With a few clicks in OCI you can create a DB system with Oracle 21c. Then nothing else standing in the way to test new features all night long.
Requirements
Unfortunately it is not possible to get Oracle 21c as Always Free Version. At least I did not find a way to do so. Therefore a few prerequisites must be fulfilled.
- An Oracle Account and active OCI Tenant
- A few OCI credits
- Compartment where you plan to deploy your DB system
- A VCN for you DB System.
VCN
Usually create my VCN’s with Terraform. That means I create my VCNs usually with a bastion host, a public and a private network. For this I use my Terraform OCI modules which are available in the Terraform registry. See tvdlab-base, tvdlab-bastion or tvdlab-vcn. A blog post is still on my todo list 
. For setting up the Oracle 21c DB system I assume that a corresponding VCN is available.
I’ll use the following information for my setup
- Compartment DB21C
- VCN db21c00
DB System
To setup the 21c database go to the main page and select Bare Metal, VM, and Exadata in the menu.
Create a DB System by pressing the corresponding blue button. Do not be surprised. On the following picture you can already see a 21c DB system.
Compared to Oracle 20c preview it does not matter if you choose Bare Metal or Virtual Machine. 21c is available for both environments. This also applies to the storage management software. I do select a Virtual Machine with the Logical Volume Manager.
As I do only use the DB System for simple feature test and engineering I keep the size to the minimum. As Oracle software I choose the Enterprise Edition. Other editions including Standard Edition are also possible.
Add you public SSH key(s) to be able to access the DB system later on via SSH. Depending on your OS you can use putty or ssh-keygen for this. Since I do work on a Mac I’ll create the pair of keys with ssh-keygen.
Finalise the system configuration by selecting your VCN and a corresponding subnet. In my case it is the VCN db21c00 and the private subnet db21c00 private.
After pressing next you come to the second page of the DB System wizard, where we configure the DB itself.
Choose a fancy name for your DB or like me just TDB21c. By the default you see, that the Database Image 19c is selected. You can change it and select 21c.
Finish the DB System wizard by selecting Create DB System.
It will take now a while until you Oracle 21c Database is ready to use. A good moment to crab a cup of coffee or write a blog post 
. I’ll do this now as well and finish this post in a couple of minutes…
