Ellison's comments Sunday provided the most detailed look to date at the new edition, 12c, which is several years in the making.

"It is the first multitenant database in the world," Ellison said of the product. Separate memory and processes are allocated to each database, according to a slide he presented.

It incorporates a "fundamentally new architecture," he said. With it, customers can take "one dedicated set of memory, one set of operating system processes and then plug multiple separate private databases into that single container."

The "c" in 12c stands for cloud. "Oracle 12c is the foundation for an expanding cloud business at Oracle," Ellison said.

While SaaS (software as a service) vendors have long incorporated multitenancy at the application layer, providing benefits such as the ability to update many customers at once, "there are problems with that," Ellison said. "I think it's a big mistake."