Oracle’s new cloud-ready multi-tenant database is now available for download on the Oracle Technology Network. The download has been made available without an official announcement from Oracle, although the product was referred to by Larry Ellison in a telephone briefing about Oracle’s sales figures.

Oracle 12c can currently be downloaded in two Standard Editions and an Enterprise Edition, for  64-bit Linux on x86 hardware, or for 64-bit Solaris on x86 hardware or 64-bit Solaris on Sparc processors. Windows versions will be available in the future. The documentation for the new version says that:

“Oracle Database 12c delivers industry leading performance, scalability, security and reliability on a choice of clustered or single-servers running Windows, Linux, and UNIX. It provides comprehensive features to easily manage the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management applications.”

For developers, improvements include 'numerous usability improvements’ to Oracle Application Express including integrated application-wide search, an advisor that inspects customer applications for common errors and security issues, dashboards throughout the product, and improved Administration screens.

The database comes with a set of packaged apps, a collection of productivity and sample apps that you can use as is, or unlock to see how they’re created to learn how to develop similar apps. Another improvement is the ability to create mobile apps using jQuery Mobile. You can declaratively define mobile apps that make use of components including HTML5 charts, HTML5 item types, and mobile calendars.

In addition to the main database, you can also download the Database Gateways for setting up a heterogeneous data integration environment, and the Grid Infrastructure extensions for use in grid environment. This consists of Oracle Clusterware, Automated Storage Management (ASM), and ASM Cluster File System.

Oracle previewed Oracle 12c at last year’s OpenWorld conference. The highlight of the new version is the support for multi-tenancy, which allocates separate memory and processes to each database even when they reside in a single database container. At OracleWorld, CEO Larry Ellison said will it provide superior security, control and efficiency for software services delivered from the cloud.