Support Oracle UCP

[davidkarlsen]

It would be nice to support Oracle UCP pooling.
The reason for it is that Oracle is in very widespread use in enterprise environments.
UCP is the preferred way to pooling with Oracle (the built-in pooling in the driver is deprecated).
UCP adds additional enterprise-grade capabilities, such as support for ONS (Oracle Notification Service), FCF (Fast Connection Failover), enhanced JMX-introspection, RAC support etc.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/12.2/jjucp/intro.html#GUID-8CF6555B-E7EA-462C-88C8-78678E43BD17

But given the comments in: #8700 this might not be acceptable, as I guess access to the Oracle Maven repo would be required (if not dealing with it all through reflection, which is not ideal).

WDYT?

If not directly in spring boot due to the above challenge with repos, would https://projects.spring.io/spring-data-jdbc-ext/ be a better place? But I do not see any specific boot support in spring-data - and also the project does not seem very active with releases etc.

Boot is used a lot in enterprise envs, and supporting enterprise requirements and best-practice patterns in the framework seems sane to me.

[wilkinsona]

I guess access to the Oracle Maven repo would be required

Yes, I think it would and that's not something that we want Spring Boot's build to rely upon. Spring Data JDBC extensions would certainly be a better place than Spring Boot for this functionality, although I'm not sure that it's the right place. Perhaps @trisberg can offer some guidance?

[fabio-grassi-gbs]

Oracle JDBC drivers have been added to Maven Central as described in this blog.

I kindly suggest to consider reopening this issue and implement it.

[wilkinsona]

Good point, @fabio-grassi-gbs. No promises at this point, but I'm going to re-open this so that we can take another look at what it would entail now that the Maven Central issue is no longer a problem.

[wilkinsona]

UCP's license is unusual (Oracle Free Use Terms and Conditions (FUTC)). It's unclear to me whether open source usage is permitted and whether or not it's compatible with Apache V2. We can't proceed here until this has been clarified.

[wilkinsona]

Legal have looked at the licence and are happy for us to proceed.