Starting with version 12c Oracle obviously has introduced another parallel distribution method for direct path loads (applicable to INSERT APPEND and CTAS operations) when dealing with partitioned objects.
As you might already know, starting with version 11.2 Oracle supported a new variation of the PQ_DISTRIBUTE hint allowing more control how data gets distributed for the actual DML load step. In addition to the already documented methods (NONE, RANDOM / RANDOM_LOCAL, PARTITION) there is a new one EQUIPART which obviously only applies to scenarios where both, source and target table are equi partitioned.
