What's new in this release?

Support and certification

Driver enhancements

• The driver has been enhanced to support both unencrypted and encrypted connections to the LDAP server. After connecting to the LDAP server, the driver retrieves the necessary connection details from it and then connects to the database server. See Using LDAP for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support User Impersonation using the new ImpersonateUser and ImpersonateUserPassword connection properties. See ImpersonateUser and ImpersonateUserPassword for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to comply with FIPS standards for data encryption. As part of this enhancement, the driver was tested with FIPS 140-3 enabled using a Red Hat OpenJDK 21 on a Red Hat Universal Base Image 9 instance. See FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support authentication using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) access tokens. You can configure this authentication using the updated AuthenticationMethod and EntraAccessToken connection properties. See Configuring Entra ID access token authentication for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support the TLSv1.3 cryptographic protocol. See CryptoProtocolVersion for details.
• The PadNumberFieldsToScale connection property has been added to the driver. It determines whether the driver pads Number values with zeroes after the decimal to match the scale of their fields when returning them. See PadNumberFieldsToScale for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support Windows Defender Credential Guard when using Kerberos Authentication. See Configuring Kerberos authentication for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support using connection information stored in an LDAP entry to establish a connection. You can configure the driver to use LDAP with the new LDAPDistinguishedName property and refreshed ServerName and PortNumber properties. For details, see Using LDAP.
• The driver has been enhanced to support connecting through Oracle Connection Manager. See Oracle Connection Manager for details.
• The BatchMechanism connection property has been added to the driver. It determines the mechanism that is used for executing batch operations. See BatchMechanism for details.

  It's a flexible replacement for BatchPerformanceWorkaround property. Therefore, if you use BatchPerformanceWorkaround for specifying the batch mechanism instead of BatchMechanism, the driver will allow it. If you use both BatchMechanism and BatchPerformanceWorkaround simultaneously, BatchMechanism will take precedence over BatchPerformanceWorkaround.

• The driver has been enhanced to support Kerberos constrained delegation. Constrained delegation is a Kerberos mechanism that allows a client application to delegate authentication to a second service. See Configuring the driver and Constrained delegation for details.
• The GSSCredential connection property has been added to the driver. It specifies the GSS credential object used to instantiate Kerberos constrained delegation. See GSSCredential for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support returning implicit result sets from stored procedures.
• The driver has been enhanced to use Oracle Internet Directory as a means to store authentication information. See Oracle Internet Directory (OID) for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support Oracle Wallet SSL authentication introduced in Oracle 11.1.0.6. The AuthenticationMethod connection property should be set to either SSL or SSLUIDPassword to allow SSL authentication when connecting with the driver. See Oracle Wallet SSL authentication for more information.
• The driver has been enhanced to support the following new data integrity algorithms for Oracle 12c and higher:
  • SHA256
  • SHA384
  • SHA512

  To learn more about these data integrity algorithms and how to use them, see DataIntegrityLevel and DataIntegrityTypes.

• The maximum supported length of identifiers has been increased to 128 bytes when connecting to Oracle 12c R2 (12.2) databases. This change has been implemented to reflect the new maximum length supported by the server.
• The driver has been enhanced to support the extended data types. When the Oracle server is configured with MAX_STRING_SIZE=EXTENDED, the driver supports the following maximum string sizes:
  • NVARCHAR2: 32766 bytes
  • RAW: 32767 bytes
  • VARCHAR2: 32767 bytes

  See "Using extended data types" for details.

• The driver has been enhanced to support Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service.
• The LOBPrefetchSize connection property has been added to the driver and is supported for Oracle database versions 12.1.0.1 and higher. This connection property allows you to specify the size of prefetch data the driver returns for BLOBs and CLOBs. With LOB prefetch enabled, the driver can return LOB meta-data and the beginning of LOB data along with the LOB locator during a fetch operation. This can have significant performance impact, especially for small LOBs which can potentially be entirely prefetched, because the data is available without having to go through the LOB protocol. See LOBPrefetchSize for details.
• The RegisterStatementPoolMonitorMBean connection property has been added to the driver. Note that the driver no longer registers the Statement Pool Monitor as a JMX MBean by default. You must set RegisterStatementPoolMonitorMBean to true to register the Statement Pool Monitor and manage statement pooling with standard JMX API calls. See RegisterStatementPoolMonitorMBean for details.

Changed behavior

• The connection property SpyAttributes has been updated to exclude the attribute load=classname, which was previously used to load the driver specified by the given class name. See SpyAttributes for details.
• The default value for the SDUSize property has been updated to 16384. See SDUSize for details.
• The default value for the DataIntegrityLevel property has been updated to accepted. See DataIntegrityLevel for details.
• The default value for the EncryptionLevel property has been updated to accepted. See EncryptionLevel for details.
• The driver no longer sets the java.security.krb5.conf system property to force the use of the krb5.conf file installed with the driver jar files in the /lib directory of the product installation directory. See Configuring Kerberos authentication for details.
• The WireProtocolMode connection property has been deprecated.