Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview An Oracle White Paper March 2, 2007
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Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Introduction... 5 Infrastructure Grid... 6 Manageability... 7 Change Assurance... 7 Management Automation... 7 Fault Diagnostics... 7 High Availability... 7 Major Data Guard Enhancements... 7 Storage Management... 8 Online Hot Database Patching... 8 Faster Database Upgrades... 8 Repair Advisors... 8 Online Operations Improvements... 8 Other High Availability Enhancements... 8 Performance... 9 SecureFiles... 9 Compression for OLTP... 9 Real Application Clusters (RAC) Optimizations... 9 Result Caches... 9 TimesTen Enhancements... 9 Other Performance Improvements... 10 Information Management... 10 Content Management... 10 XML... 10 Oracle Text... 10 Spatial... 11 Multimedia and Medical Imaging... 11 Semantic Technologies... 11 Information Integration... 11 Streams Replication and Message Queuing... 11 SQL Gateways... 11 Scheduler... 11 Networking... 12 Security... 12 Information Lifecycle Management... 12 Flashback Data Archive... 12 Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence... 13 Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 3
Improved Manageability... 13 OLAP... 13 Data Mining... 13 Application Development... 13 PL/SQL... 13 Java / JDBC... 14.NET and Windows... 14 PHP... 14 SQL Developer... 14 Application Express... 15 BI Publisher... 15 Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 4
Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Oracle Database 11g includes extensive new features and enhancements across Infrastructure Grids, Information Management, and Application Development. INTRODUCTION Organizations today need to support multiple terabytes of information for growing user populations that demand fast, secure access to business applications 24x7. In an increasingly competitive world, business executives are dependent on Information Technology (IT) to make more effective use of information, streamline business processes and control costs. IT Managers are being asked to develop and deliver new applications, adhere to industry and legislative compliance mandates, and cost-effectively meet stringent user service level objectives. Oracle Database 11g consolidates and extends Oracle s unique ability to deliver the benefits of Grid computing. Oracle Infrastructure Grids fundamentally changed the way data centers look and operate, transforming data centers from silos of isolated system resources to shared pools of servers and storage. Oracle s unique Grid architecture enables all types of applications to scale-out server and storage capacity on-demand. By clustering low cost commodity server and storage modules on Infrastructure Grids, organizations are able to improve user service levels, reduce downtime, and make more efficient use of their IT resources. In today s 24x7 global economy IT systems cannot afford to be down; they have to be reliable and quickly recoverable in the event of any kind of failure. Oracle Database 11g protects systems from all common causes of planned and unplanned downtime. This includes server, storage and site failures and the biggest cause of all human error. With Oracle Database 11g organizations are able to implement reliable disaster recovery strategies that make cost effective use of their disaster recovery resources for reporting, development, testing, upgrades and other tasks. Managing service level objectives is an ongoing challenge. Users expect fast, secure access to business applications 24x7, and IT managers have to deliver without increasing costs and resources. The manageability features in Oracle Database 11g are designed to help organizations easily manage Infrastructure Grids and deliver on their users service level expectations. Oracle Database 11g introduces more self-management, automation and advisors that will help reduce management costs, while increasing the performance, scalability and security of their business applications around the clock. Organizations are increasingly finding their information is at risk. Data breaches are very costly to organizations and can impact viability. In addition, compliance Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 5
regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the Payment Card Industry data security standard require organizations to securely protect their databases. Building on 30 years of secure practices, Oracle Database 11g helps organizations securely protect their information with unique secure configurations, data encryption and masking, and sophisticated auditing capabilities. Compliance regulations, legal discoveries and the trend towards consolidated data warehouses are contributing factors in databases trebling in size every two years. This can have a significant impact on storage costs and the performance, reliability and manageability of very large databases. Oracle Database 11g enables organizations to easily scale-out large transactional and data warehousing systems, delivering fast data access 24x7 using low-cost modular storage. New Oracle Database 11g features help administrators efficiently manage this information load throughout its lifecycle by optimizing storage resources according to demand. XML has emerged as an industry standard for storing and exchanging data in an efficient manner, and organizations are recognizing the need to integrate different types of information from office documents and spreadsheets to medical images and geographical data into routine business operations. It makes sound economic sense to store, manipulate and protect all types of information in a common repository. Oracle Database 11g uniquely delivers a secure and scalable platform for reliable, fast access to all types of information using industry standard interfaces. In addition to an extensive list of new features and enhancements, Oracle Database 11g will help organizations take full advantage of Infrastructure Grids by managing the change process. Change is a constant; IT is constantly upgrading servers, rolling out upgrades, applying patches, resolving problems and more. Unique change assurance features in Oracle Database 11g are designed to manage changes in a controlled, cost effective manner by minimizing the risk of change and potential for error. Customer and partners began Oracle Database 11g beta testing in September 2006 and it is expected to be available for production use in 2007. Oracle s Infrastructure Grid technology enables systems to be built out of pools of low cost servers and storage that deliver the highest quality of service in terms of manageability, high availability, and performance. INFRASTRUCTURE GRID Oracle s Infrastructure Grid technology enables IT systems to be built out of pools of low cost servers and storage that deliver the highest quality of service in terms of manageability, high availability, and performance. Oracle Database 11g extends Oracle s existing Grid capabilities in the following areas: Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 6
New manageability features and enhancements increase DBA productivity, reduce costs, minimize errors, and maximize the quality of service that DBAs deliver to their customers. Manageability New manageability features and enhancements increase DBA productivity, reduce costs, minimize errors, and maximize quality of service. Change Assurance Oracle Database 11g dramatically lowers the cost of database upgrades and other software and hardware system changes by making it significantly easier to test systems before and after the change to identify and fix problems. The Database Replay facility allows you to easily capture actual production workloads at the database level and replay them on your test system to fully test the impact of system changes including critical concurrency characteristics. The SQL Performance Analyzer facility identifies SQL execution plan changes and performance regressions. Identified problems can then be fixed using SQL Tuning Advisor by either reverting to the original execution plans or by further tuning. Management Automation Oracle Database 11g continues the effort begun in Oracle9i and carried on through Oracle Database 10g to dramatically simplify and ultimately fully automate the tasks that DBAs need to perform. New in Oracle Database 11g is Automatic SQL Tuning with self-learning capabilities. Other new capabilities include automatic, unified tuning of both SGA and PGA memory buffers and new advisors for partitioning, database repair, streams performance, and space management. Enhancements to the Oracle Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) give it a better global view of performance in Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) environments and improved comparative performance analysis capabilities. Fault Diagnostics New fault diagnostic capabilities in Oracle Database 11g make it much easier for customers to capture the data needed by Oracle Support when errors occur so that problems can be resolved faster and less demands are placed on customers to reproduce problems. New high availability capabilities reduce downtime even further with enhancements to Oracle s Data Guard disaster recovery offering, improved online operations, support for online hot database patching, faster database upgrades, and more. High Availability New high availability features further reduce the risk of downtime and data loss with major enhancements to Oracle s Data Guard disaster recovery offering, important high availability enhancements to Automatic Storage Management, support for online hot database patching, faster database upgrades, improved online operations, and more. Major Data Guard Enhancements Oracle Database 11g provides a number of significant Data Guard enhancements. These include the ability to run real-time queries on a Physical Standby system for Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 7
reporting and other purposes, the ability to do online rolling database upgrades by temporarily converting a Physical Standby system to Logical Standby, and Snapshot Standby to support test environments. In addition, performance for both Physical and Logical Standby is improved, Logical Standby now supports XMLType (CLOB) data types and Transparent Data Encryption, and automatic fast-start failover is now supported for asynchronous transports. Storage Management Automatic Storage Management (ASM) has a number of important high availability enhancements including support for rolling upgrades, automatic bad block detection and repair, and fast mirror resync which can efficiently resynchronize storage arrays being mirrored by ASM when storage network connectivity is temporarily lost. In addition, ASM performance enhancements speed database open times for very large databases, reduce SGA memory consumption, and allow the storage allocation unit size to be increased to speed large sequential I/Os. Online Hot Database Patching Many one-off database patches, including diagnostic patches, can now be applied with no downtime in both Real Application Clusters (RAC) and non-rac environments. Faster Database Upgrades Both patch set and release upgrades are now significantly faster through use of parallelism and delayed compilation of PL/SQL objects. Repair Advisors New Repair Advisors significantly reduces downtime by quickly identifying the root cause of failures, presenting the available repair options to the DBA, and in some cases automatically correcting the problem through self-healing mechanisms. Online Operations Improvements A number of improvements have been made to Oracle online redefinition operations. These include finer grained dependency tracking so that new columns and procedures can be added without incurring unnecessary recompilation of dependent objects, easier to execute online alter table operations, fast add column with default values, and online index build with no pause to DML operations. Other High Availability Enhancements In addition, Flashback Transaction provides push button back out of rogue transactions along with other dependent transaction changes. Platform migration and data movement capabilities are enhanced with more transportable options including transportable partitions, schemas, and cross-platform databases. Tighter Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 8
integration with Windows backup is achieved with RMAN support for Windows VSS snapshots. Oracle Database 11g includes many innovative new performance capabilities including SecureFiles, compression for OLTP, RAC optimizations, Result Caches, TimesTen enhancements, and more. Performance Oracle Database 11g includes many innovative new performance capabilities including: SecureFiles SecureFiles are Oracle s next generation offering for storing large objects (LOBs) such as images and large text objects or advanced datatypes such as XML, medical imaging, and geospatial raster objects inside the database. SecureFiles offer excellent performance fully comparable to file systems, automatic management, and advanced functionality such as intelligent compression, transparent encryption, and transparent de-duplication. Compression for OLTP Data compression is now supported for update, insert, and delete operations commonly used in OLTP applications. Previous Oracle Database releases supported compression for bulk data loading operations commonly used for data warehousing application. Performance improvements come from more effective use of memory for caching data and reduced I/O for scans. Compression ratios between 2X and 3X can be achieved with very minimal processing overhead. Real Application Clusters (RAC) Optimizations The RAC cache fusion protocol has been optimized to deliver even better performance for many common usage scenarios such as access to read mostly data, long running queries, and access to LOB datatypes stored as SecureFiles. Result Caches Result caches greatly speed the repeated execution of queries and function calls that access read-only or read-mostly data. The new server result cache stores the results of queries, query blocks, or PL/SQL function calls for immediate transparent reuse by all users. The new client-side query cache eliminates round trips to the server by storing query results for immediate reuse by users sharing the same client application server. TimesTen Enhancements TimesTen is Oracle s application-tier in-memory database for blazingly fast response times and real-time data caching. During the Oracle Database 11g release timeframe, releases of TimesTen will add even more compatibility with Oracle, including improved compatibility with Oracle data types, SQL, PL/SQL, OCI, globalization and management infrastructure, as well as additional performance Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 9
improvements and functionality such more sophisticated caching and failover capabilities. Other Performance Improvements Other performance improvements include 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 and more reliable direct connections to NFS storage devices, faster upgrades, and faster Data Guard and Streams replication. With the Oracle Infrastructure Grid as the foundation, Oracle provides the additional functionality needed to manage all information in the enterprise with robust security, information lifecycle management, and integrated business intelligence analytics and tools to support fast and accurate business decisions at the lowest cost. INFORMATION MANAGEMENT With the Oracle Infrastructure Grid as the foundation, Oracle provides the additional functionality needed to manage all information in the enterprise with robust security, information lifecycle management, and integrated business intelligence analytics to support fast and accurate business decisions at the lowest cost. Oracle Database 11g extends Oracle s existing Information Management capabilities in the following areas: Content management of advanced data types such as XML, text, spatial, multimedia, medical imaging, and the new, emerging semantic technologies are a rapid growth area for many enterprises. Content Management Content management of advanced data types such as XML, spatial, multimedia, medical imaging, and semantic technologies are a rapid growth area for many enterprises. The industry leader in all these areas, Oracle Database 11g offers significant new functionality including the new SecureFiles feature (described above) that significantly enhances the performance of all of these features. XML Oracle Database 11g provides new XML storage and query enhancements including Binary XML storage and XML Path Indexing for schema-less XML documents. Other enhancements expand support for standards such as XQuery 1.0, JCR 1.0, SQL:2007, and SOA; XML repository enhancements such as events, XLink / XInclude, and NFS 4.0; and 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, Oracle Enterprise Manager support for ease of administration, and user-defined relevance scoring. Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 10
Spatial Spatial enhancements include support for richer, more interactive map application development, web services APIs for spatial operations, business intelligence tools integration, dynamic input for routing applications, and 3D support for terrain and city models and virtual worlds. Multimedia and Medical Imaging Highlights of intermedia enhancements in Oracle Database 11g include a 3X performance improvement for common image processing operations, large media handling (up to 128 TB) for broadcast, medical and security applications, DICOM medical imaging support for secure, multi-terabyte regional and national archives, and support for new Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) standards. Semantic Technologies Oracle Database 11g is the industry s first open, scalable, secure, and reliable semantic database with native RDF and OWL standards support capable of managing datasets over 10X larger than specialized RDF and OWL databases. Oracle provides more complete and accurate querying capabilities and enables existing SQL application to be easily extended with semantic search and query. Oracle Database 11g includes many new enhancements and features to better integrate the enterprise. Information Integration Oracle Database 11g includes many new enhancements and features to better integrate data throughout the enterprise. Streams Replication and Message Queuing Streams replication has been enhanced to support XML Type (CLOBS) and Transparent Data Encryption. Performance has been improved with a 30% - 50% speedup of SQL Apply. New manageability improvements include the Streams Performance Advisor, topology views, and Application Workload Repository (AWR) and Automatic Database Diagnostic Manager (ADDM) support. New functionality includes a data comparison utility and synchronous capture. New Advance Queuing (AQ) features include JMS performance improvements, direct Streams AQ support in JDBC, and scalable event notification. SQL Gateways Oracle SQL Gateways have improved performance, improved statistic collection for better execution plans, and parallel operations for bulk load. New gateways support legacy databases such as IMS, VSAM, and ADABAS. Scheduler Scheduler has been enhanced to give it enterprise reach. Scheduler can now schedule both database and operating system level jobs across distributed systems. Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 11
Networking Net Services has been enhanced to proved improved performance for large data transfers, non-anonymous LDAP access for net naming, and better diagnostics and tracing. Oracle s Transparent Data Encryption capability has been significantly enhanced in Oracle Database 11g to support tablespace encryption, integration with hardware security modules for high assurance master key protection, and support for LOB datatypes, Log Miner, and Logical Standby. Security Oracle s Transparent Data Encryption capability is significantly enhanced in Oracle Database 11g to support tablespace encryption, integration with hardware security modules for high assurance master key protection, and support for LOB datatypes, Log Miner, and Logical Standby. Manageability is improved with comprehensive Enterprise Manager support for security functions. Password security is enhanced with support for case sensitive, multi-byte passwords and strong password hashing algorithms (SHA-1, salt). Additional secure by default configuration settings support password policies and audit options. Also, strong authentication support for SYSDBA and SYSOPER connections and enhanced support for Kerberos is provided. Oracle s support for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) has been enhanced with several significant extensions to Oracle s table partitioning capabilities plus the new Oracle ILM Assistant. Information Lifecycle Management Oracle s support for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is enhanced with several significant extensions to Oracle s table partitioning capabilities plus the new Oracle ILM Assistant. New partitioning capabilities include partitioning by parent / child references, partitioning by virtual columns, more composite partitioning options including Range/Range, List/Range, List/Hash, List/List, and interval partitioning to automatically create new partitions based on intervals such as every month or every day. Oracle Database 11g also supports transportable partitions so that partitions can be easily and efficiently moved between systems. The Oracle ILM Assistant allows administrators to define ILM requirements for data placement, security, and regulatory compliance and provides timely advice and scripts to help the DBA meet these requirements. Flashback Data Archive Flashback Data Archives provides an easy, practical way to add a time dimension to your data for change tracking, ILM, auditing, compliance and other purposes by enabling you to query data in selected tables AS OF earlier times in the past. Flashback Data Archive provides automatic and efficient storage of undo data to enable fast query access to even very old versions of the data. DBA can set retention policies to automatically purge data when age thresholds are reached. Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 12
Oracle s data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) capabilities have been enhanced to improve manageability and make advanced technologies such as OLAP and Data Mining more easily accessible to mainstream users. Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence Oracle s data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) capabilities have been enhanced to improve manageability and make advanced technologies such as OLAP and Data Mining more easily accessible to mainstream users. Improved Manageability Oracle Database 11g improves DW manageability in a number of ways. Oracle Enterprise Manager is now fully DW aware including DW-specific screens and comprehensive cover of DW functionality including parallelism and partitioning. Improved ADDM support for RAC and parallel operations plus the integration of parallel operations with Automatic Workload Management enables users to leverage Grid Computing even more optimally for data warehousing. OLAP Oracle OLAP capabilities are now fully integrated with the Oracle Materialized Views (MVs) facility. OLAP cubes can now be automatically refreshed from relational data just like MVs and transparently accessed using SQL through automatic query rewrite. Use of OLAP cubes provides faster query performance, faster builds and maintenance of aggregates, and makes advanced OLAP business calculations available via SQL. Data Mining Data Mining in Oracle Database 11g is both easier to use and more powerful. Ease of use is improved through Automatic Data Preparation at the SQL/Java API level, an improved Oracle Data Mining GUI management tool, tighter integration with the database, and SuperModels for combining data preparation processes with the mining model. New generalized Linear Models and more predictive analytics make Data Mining more powerful. Oracle Database 11g adds significant new capabilities to all the major application development environments: PL/SQL, Java / JDBC,.NET and Windows, PHP, SQL Developer, and Application Express. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT Oracle Database 11g adds significant new capabilities to all the major application development environments. PL/SQL New fully automatic native compilation of PL/SQL in the database delivers dramatic performance improvements. There is just one parameter to set to turn native compilation on. There is no need for a C compiler and no file system DLLs to manage. Dramatic performance improvements are achievable on the order of 50% - 100% faster for pure PL/SQL code and 10% - 30% faster for more typical applications containing SQL when compared to non-compiled code. Other enhancements include performance improvements for triggers, finer grained Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 13
dependency tracking, dynamic SQL enhancements, and a more powerful performance analysis tool. Java / JDBC The new Java JIT (Just in Time) native compiler offers dramatic performance improvements and is fully automatic. JIT compilation happens on the fly as a background activity that is transparent to the user. It does not require a C compiler and the binary compiled Java code is stored persistently to avoid recompilations. Compared to previous compilation technology (i.e., NCOMP), the JIT furnishes dramatic performance improvements, out of the box, on the order of 100% faster for pure Java code and 30% - 100% faster for typical applications containing SQL. Ease of use has been enhanced with a new like JDK interface aimed at preserving the user experience for traditional Java developers when they move to Java in the database. Oracle Database 11g supports new Oracle Database features such as Database Change Notification and Advanced Oracle Security for JDBC-Thin, offers additional performance enhancements including faster AQ/JMS operations and reduced database roundtrips, and is JDBC 4.0 and Java SE 5.0 compliant for the JDBC drivers and OracleJVM respectively..net and Windows New Oracle Data Provider for.net (ODP.NET) features in Oracle Database 11g include more granular Database Change Notification through tracking changes at the row level; overall faster data access performance; Instant Client support; and 64-bit (x64 and Itanium) ADO.NET support. The performance of Oracle Provider for OLE DB is improved. New Windows features include support for the Windows backup infrastructure with a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) writer, Active Directory integration improvements, and Windows Vista support. PHP The new Database Resident Connection Pool facility will enable faster connections to the database for application environments like PHP that don t provide connection pooling. SQL Developer SQL Developer, Oracle s free database development productivity tool, will be enhanced in the Oracle Database 11g release timeframe with new tuning capabilities, including database activity reporting (AWR and ASH) a PL/SQL profiler, and expanded support for tablespaces, jobs, intermedia, Context, version control, and visual query building. SQL Developer will also support PDF printing, hyperlinked source code browsing, and a migration workbench extension for databases such as SQL Server, MySQL, and Access. Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 14
Application Express Application Express, Oracle s declarative, browser-based, rapid application development tool for building database centric applications, will be enhanced in the Oracle Database 11g release timeframe with new prepackaged applications for popular functions such as blogs, discussion forums, surveys, bug tracking, storefront, and more. Other major capabilities will include reporting (with XML Publisher integration), Microsoft Access migration aids, declarative Ajax support (providing a rich client experience without the programming), and drag and drop form layout. BI Publisher Oracle Database 11g also includes Oracle BI Publisher Oracle s enterprise reporting solution. Oracle BI Publisher provides a central architecture for authoring, managing, and delivering information to employees, customers, and business partners both securely and in the right format. Oracle BI Publisher reduces the high costs associated with the development, customization, and maintenance of business documents, while increasing the efficiency of reports management. Utilizing a set of familiar desktop tools users can create and maintain their own report formats based on data queries created by IT staff or developers. Oracle Database 11g New Features Overview Page 15
Oracle Database New Features Overview March 2, 2007 Author: Gordon Smith Contributing Authors: William Hardie Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com Copyright 2007, Oracle. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.