New Developer Features in Oracle 23.7

Oracle Corporation recently announced the general availability of Oracle Database 23.7, a release that delivers several new features specifically designed to improve developer productivity, simplify data handling, and accelerate performance across diverse workloads.

New Developer Features in Oracle 23.7: Highlights

This latest update reflects Oracle’s continued focus on making the developer experience more intuitive and performant across key use cases including analytics, application development, and cloud-native integrations.

New TIME_BUCKET Function Simplifies Time-Based Grouping

Oracle Database 23.7 introduces the new TIME_BUCKET function, designed to streamline the grouping of datetime values into defined intervals such as five minutes, two hours, or three days. This enhancement removes the need for custom calculations and significantly reduces complexity in SQL queries involving time-based data aggregation.

The function supports up to five parameters:

• Datetime: the value to be bucketed
• Stride: the interval size
• Origin: the reference point for grouping
• Start_or_end (optional): defines if the start or end of the bucket is returned
• Timebucket_optional_clause (optional): manages overflow and edge cases
   

Developers can now perform interval grouping operations with greater clarity and efficiency, enabling faster development of analytical queries and reports.

Materialized Columns Enable Write-Time Calculations

Oracle 23.7 debuts materialized columns, extending the virtual column concept introduced in Oracle 11g. While virtual columns calculate values at query time, materialized columns perform these calculations at the time of data insertion or update, storing the computed results for faster retrieval.

This feature is particularly useful for “write-few, read-often” scenarios. It offloads the computational burden from queries and improves performance for frequently accessed derived data. Benchmarking shows materialized columns returning results nearly ten times faster than their virtual counterparts when reading from a dataset with complex calculations.

New JSON-Based Metadata Access via DBMS_DEVELOPER.GET_METADATA()

Oracle also introduced a significant metadata API update through the new DBMS_DEVELOPER.GET_METADATA() function. While the existing DBMS_METADATA package provides DDL and XML outputs, the new function returns metadata as clean, structured JSON, optimized for use in modern, API-driven and web-native applications.

Key benefits include:

• Rapid JSON retrieval of metadata for tables, views, and indexes
• Simplified invocation with fewer parameters
• Improved performance over legacy methods
• Support for etag values to detect object changes efficiently
• Adjustable metadata verbosity using BASIC, TYPICAL, or ALL levels
   

This functionality positions Oracle Database as a more agile and developer-friendly platform in JSON-first environments.

JavaScript-to-PL/SQL Foreign Function Interface Now Available

Oracle Database 23.7 builds on the Multilingual Engine (MLE) by introducing native JavaScript support for calling PL/SQL packages. Developers can now seamlessly bridge JavaScript modules and PL/SQL procedures using the mle-js-plsql-ffi library, enabling use cases such as:

• Server-side random number generation
• PL/SQL utility access from JavaScript applications
• Hybrid module development across languages
   

The update supports importing packages like DBMS_RANDOM directly into JavaScript functions and returning results to the calling SQL layer.

Support for Shrinking SMALLFILE Tablespaces

Complementing the DBMS_SPACE.SHRINK_TABLESPACE support for BIGFILE tablespaces introduced in earlier versions, Oracle Database 23.7 now allows shrinking of SMALLFILE tablespaces. This addition provides developers and DBAs with better disk space management by defragmenting storage and reducing overall footprint.

A new analyze mode helps estimate potential space savings before the operation is executed. Testing demonstrates that shrinking a SMALLFILE tablespace reduced datafile size from 0.78GB to 0.19GB, reclaiming over 75% of disk space in the process.

Continued Focus on Developer Experience

“These latest innovations in Oracle Database 23.7 mark a strategic step toward simplifying the developer experience,” said Gerald Venzl, Lead Product Manager for Developer Initiatives at Oracle. “From optimizing how developers group time-based data, to enabling lightning-fast metadata access and cross-language functionality with JavaScript, we’re focused on streamlining both backend and application-layer development.”