It seems that Oracle brings us the new release with the first “spring rays”. Tonight Oracle has Updates the MOS Note 742060.1 Release Schedule of Current Database Releases. It now includes as well sections for Oracle public cloud releases, on-premises engineered systems as well on-premises server releases. In particular the section on-premises server release has now a release date for Oracle 12.2.0.1. According to this, Oracle 12.2.0.1 will be available for Linux x86-64, Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86-64 by mid of march. For the other platforms like Windows, AIX etc we have to wait until Q2. As posted earlier the documentation for the new release is available since a couple of weeks. There is no reason not to start with the engineering work for the new release.

By the way, there are some other changes as well on this MOS Note. The attentive reader has seen, that Oracle has again extended their Free Extended Support for 11.2.0.4 until Dec 31, 2018. Unfortunately there are some contradictions with other MOS Notes like 161818.1 and 1067455.1. On these notes the Free Extended Supports ends earlier. You probabely should clarify your support status before planing to keep your 11.2.0.4 production database until end of 2018.

Some references and links to MOS Notes:

• Release Schedule of Current Database Releases [742060.1]
• Oracle Database (RDBMS) Releases Support Status Summary [161818.1]
• Lifetime Support Summary for Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) [1067455.1]
• Oracle 12c Release 2 Documentation docs.oracle.com
• OraDBA blog post Oracle 12 Release 2 Documentation available
• TechnoCircle Oracle Database 12c Release 2 New Features