CDB is an acronym for “Container Database” and PDB is an acronym for “Pluggable Database”. I think it will be easier to explain with a metaphor for DBAs. Think of a freight train with many cars up to 250. Each container could be having different contents, with delivery target for different customers and completely packed/sealed independently with customer options but the entire freight is carried by a single engine or carrier at the front. It will be stupid enough to run 250 freight trucks but rather it is efficient to consolidate them into a single freight train. When running independently we will spend on gas, drivers’ expenses and much more complicated to manage them. The freight train is basically the CDB and each car is the PDB.
PDB is fully backward compatible to pre-12.1 database releases. There is nothing different from a developer or application connectivity perspective. Everything stays the same but the PDB will belong to a single CDB. When application connects to the PDB, it will specify the destination PDB via a database service. All home-grown or third party applications typically will have connectivity defined out of the application so it is easier to just change the service name outside of the application code. So all database connectivity should use “database service” rather than using the legacy approach of ORACLE_SID based connectivity. ORACLE_SID ties the application connectivity to a specific database instance and does not give the scalability or high availability. You can have many pluggable databases in 12.1.you can have up to 250 pluggable databases or PDBs within one container database or CDB. It is clear that there is one-to-many relationship between CDB and PDBS.
