it is under construction. It should be out sometime this summer/early fall.

Don't expect huge changes! There will be additions for things like session private stats on global temporary tables, the ability to have undo go to temp for temp tables, 32k strings and their impact, multiple same type indexes, partitioning changes, pluggable databases (of course) and other things - but the core basics haven't changed.

The main architecture is the same (even considering pluggable - there is still a LGWR and it still does what LGWR did). Transactions are by and large the same. Redo and Undo are mostly unchanged (temporary undo being an add). Locking and latching - fundamentally the same.

So - don't expect it to be a new features book (some have in the past with the second edition - when I upgraded it from 10g to 11g - it wasn't). It is purely an update to cover any fundamental changes. It won't cover things like "using an identity" (a new option to a number column, we'll create a sequence and auto-assign that sequence to the column upon insert). An identity is a feature of the database - it isn't really an architecture feature though (just like I never covered default values in the past either).