ColdFusion support for Oracle 23c/23ai and multitenant architecture?

Report · Sep 11, 2024

My company is starting to investigate upgrading from Oracle 19c to 23c/23ai (whatever you want to call it) and we have a couple apps running on ColdFusion. We are currently on CF 2021, but expect to upgrade to CF 2023 by the end of the year. The support matrices for CF 2021 & 2023 only show support up to Oracle 19c. First question - any idea when/if Adobe will support newer versions of Oracle than 19c? Will it be in one of the current CF versions or future 202?

I understand the support matrix docs only list the versions that Adobe has officially tested and it could be possible to download and use an OJDBC driver directly from Oracle, setting it up as an "Other" datasource, however I can't find any documentation on whether ColdFusion has support for multitenant architecture and what changes need to be made for multitenancy, which is apparently available in Oracle 19c and required in 23c/23ai.

There is an old forum posting from 2014 asking about connecting CF 11 to Oracle 12c and how to change the connection string for multitenant, but no answers.

Second question, has anyone successfully connected CF with an Oracle multitenant DB (any version)? If so, can you please provide details on how? JDBC string, updated drivers, config changes, etc.

Report · Sep 12, 2024

Please say more about what you mean by the question, "when/if Adobe will support newer versions of Oracle than 19c?" . According to the ColdFusion 2023 Support Matrix, ColdFusion 2023 does in fact support Oracle 19c.

Multitenant architecture is design, not implementation. As an application server, ColdFusion is tasked with implementation, for a given design. In this case, the multitenant design pertains to the Oracle database. Therefore, asking whether ColdFusion has support for multitenant architecture is, I think, not a relevant question. I would therefore expect ColdFusion 2023 to work with multitenant Oracle 19c.

I have yet to work with multitenant Oracle. Nevertheless, I have a suggestion.

You could configure ColdFusion to connect to a specific pluggable database within Oracle's multitenant architecture as follows:

Download the Oracle JDBC driver and copy it to the ColdFusion lib directory.
Restart ColdFusion (to load the new driver).
Configure the new data source in the ColdFusion Administrator, selecting "Other" as driver.
Use the following format:
<JDBC_URL>: jdbc:oracle:thin:@//<host>:<port>/<service_name>
<host>: The hostname or IP address of your Oracle server.
<port>: The port number (default is 1521).
<service_name>: The service name of your (multitenant) pluggable database.

Report · Sep 12, 2024

Please say more about what you mean by the question, "when/if Adobe will support newer versions of Oracle than 19c?" . According to the ColdFusion 2023 Support Matrix, ColdFusion 2023 does in fact support Oracle 19c.

There are at least two versions newer than Oracle 19c - 21c and 23c/23ai. As explained in my original post, we are currently on 19c but looking at upgrading to 23c/23ai. My question was when will Adobe ColdFusion support newer versions of Oracle, i.e., 21c and 23c/23ai?

Regarding multitenant, we have not yet switched to using multitenant architecture in Oracle, so I don't know what, if anything, needs to change in the JDBC connection string or datasource config from ColdFusion. The only posting I found on Adobe Community indicated the standard JDBC string might not work. I was looking for responses from people who had successfully connected ColdFusion 2021/2023 to an Oracle multitenant database, and whether they had to make any adjustments on the ColdFusion side to connect.

Report · Sep 12, 2024

Fair enough. Let's hope that Adobe's ColdFusion team and fellow ColdFusion developers who have successfully connected ColdFusion to an Oracle multitenant database will chime in.