Changes in Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2)

Support for Network File System (NFS) protocol

See Introducing Network File System (NFS) for more information.

Collation with LOB data types

The  default and the only supported collation with LOB data types is USING NLS_COMP. Table columns with data type BLOB, CLOB, and NCLOB have USING NLS_COMP as default collation value and specifying any other collation value will throw an error.

See Oracle Database SQL Language Reference for more information.

Support for Distributed LOBs

You can select a persistent LOB from a remote table into a local LOB variable and use it in SQL statements, DBMS_LOB and OCILob API 

See Distributed LOBs, for more information.

Support for TO_CLOB (BFILE/BLOB), TO_BLOB (BFILE), and TO_CHAR (BFILE/BLOB) operators.

See Oracle Database SQL Language Reference for more information.

Support for Database File system (DBFS) POSIX File locking feature.

See Database File System (DBFS)— POSIX File Locking, for more information.

The following SQL functions on lob columns are enabled for predicate evaluation in Exadata cell server.

• LENGTH

• SUBSTR

• INSTRM CONCAT

• LPAD

• RPAD

• LTRIM

• RTRIM

• LOWER

• UPPER

• NLS_LOWER

• NLS_UPPER

• NVL

• REPLACE

• REGEXP_INSTR

• TO_CHAR.