Oracle Tips: Oracle Database 11g New Features

ORACLE DATABASE 11g :    New Features

 

Oracle Database 11g, building on Oracle's unique ability to deliver Grid Computing, gives Oracle customers the agility to respond faster to changing business conditions, gain competitive advantage through technology innovation, and reduce costs.

With Oracle Database 11g you can:

• Adopt new technology faster with Real Application Testing
• Manage more data for less with advanced compression and partitioning
• Simplify systems by storing all your data in the Oracle Database with Oracle Fast Files
• Maximize the ROI of disaster recovery resources with new Data Guard advances
• Free critical personnel for strategic tasks with management automation

Boost DBA Productivity with Management Automation

 

Oracle Database 11g continues the effort—begun in Oracle9i Database and carried on

through Oracle Database 10g—of dramatically simplifying and fully automating DBA tasks.

 

New capabilities in Oracle Database 11g include

• Automatic SQL tuning with self-learning capabilities

• Automatic, unified tuning of both System Global Area (SGA) and Program Global Area

(PGA) memory buffers

 

New advisors for partitioning, data recovery, streams performance, and space management

• Enhancements to the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM), which provide

a better global view of performance in Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC)

environments and improved comparative-performance analysis capabilities

 

Enable Rapid Data Recovery Through Oracle Data Guard

 

Oracle Data Guard coordinates the maintenance and synchronization of your database

between local and remote servers for rapid recovery from disaster or site failure. Oracle

Database 11g provides a number of significant Oracle Data Guard enhancements, including

 

• The ability to run real-time queries on a physical standby system for reporting and

other purposes

• The ability to perform online, rolling database upgrades by temporarily converting a

physical standby system to logical standby

• Snapshot standby to support test environments

In addition, performance for both physical and logical standby is improved. Logical standby

now supports Extensible Markup Language (XML) Type character large object (CLOB)

datatypes and transparent data encryption. Automatic fast-start failover is now supported for

asynchronous transports.

 

Protect Data with Automatic Storage Management

 

With Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Database 11g automatically mirrors and

balances data across the available storage devices to protect data and optimize performance—

even when you add or remove new disks. Oracle Database 11g delivers several important

high-availability enhancements for Automatic Storage Management, including

• Support for rolling upgrades

• Automatic bad-block detection and repair

• Fast mirror resync, which efficiently resynchronizes storage arrays that Automatic Storage

Management mirrors when storage network connectivity is temporarily lost

 

Improve Online Operations

 

Oracle Database 11g includes a number of improvements to online redefinition

operations, including

• Finer-grained dependency tracking, which allows the addition of new columns and

procedures without incurring unnecessary recompilation of dependent objects

• Online alter table operations that are easier to execute

• Fast “add column” with default values

• Online index build with no pause to data manipulation language (DML) operations

 

Improve Online Operations

 

Oracle Database 11g includes a number of improvements to online redefinition

operations, including

 

• Finer-grained dependency tracking, which allows the addition of new columns and

procedures without incurring unnecessary recompilation of dependent objects

• Online alter table operations that are easier to execute

• Fast “add column” with default values

• Online index build with no pause to data manipulation language (DML) operations

 

Improve Online Operations

 

Oracle Database 11g includes a number of improvements to online redefinition

operations, including

• Finer-grained dependency tracking, which allows the addition of new columns and

procedures without incurring unnecessary recompilation of dependent objects

• Online alter table operations that are easier to execute

• Fast “add column” with default values

• Online index build with no pause to data manipulation language (DML) operations

 

Other Performance Improvements

 

Oracle Database 11g features other high-performance improvements, including

 

• Automatic compilation for PL/SQL and Java in the database

• Faster triggers, including more-efficient invocations of per-row triggers

• Faster simple SQL operations

• Faster Oracle Data Guard and Oracle Streams replication

• Faster and more-reliable direct connections to network file system (NFS) storage devices

• Faster upgrades

• Faster backup/restore for large files

• Faster backup compression

 

XML

 

Oracle Database 11g provides new XML storage and query enhancements, including

 

• Binary XML storage and XML path indexing for schema-less XML documents

• Expanded support for standards, such as XML Query (XQuery) 1.0, Java Content

Repository (JCR) 1.0, SQL:2007, and service-oriented architecture (SOA)

• XML repository enhancements such as events, XML Linking Language (XLink)/XML

Inclusions (XInclude), and NFS 4.0

• Streams replication and logical standby support for XML Type (CLOBs)

Oracle Text

New Oracle Text enhancements include

• Query performance and scalability improvements

• Advanced multilingual search

• Online indexing operations

• Support for Oracle Enterprise Manager for ease of administration

• User-defined relevance scoring

 

PL/SQL

 

Oracle Database 11g delivers dramatic performance improvements with new “native”

compilation of PL/SQL. Native compilation is easily turned on by setting a single parameter.

There’s no need for a C compiler, and there are no file system DLLs to manage. Native

compilation can improve performance 50 to 100 percent for pure PL/SQL code and 10 to 30

percent for more typical application code containing SQL (when compared to noncompiled

code).

 

Other enhancements include

 

·   New table Data Type "simple_integer" - A new 11g datatype dubbed

simple_integer is introduced. The simple_integer data type is always NOT

NULL, wraps instead of overflows and is faster than PLS_INTEGER.

 

Performance improvements for triggers

 

• Finer-grained dependency tracking

• Dynamic SQL enhancements

• A more powerful performance analysis tool

 

 

SQL Performance Analyzer (sql replay):

 

With this feature we can predict the impact of system changes on a workload. Using this we can forecast changes in response times for SQL after a change. This can be very handy in cases like parameter changes, schema changes, hardware changes, os changes, db upgrades…Any change that influence sql plans is a good candidate for this feature.