What's New in Heterogeneous Connectivity User's Guide?

This section describes new features of the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) and provides pointers to additional information. New features information from previous releases is retained to help those users migrating to the current release.

The following sections describe the new features in Oracle Database Heterogeneous Connectivity User's Guide:

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) New Features

• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) New Features

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) New Features

New features for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) in the Oracle Database Heterogeneous Connectivity User's Guide include:

• Gateway CHAR Semantics

  This feature allows any HS-based gateway to optionally run in CHAR Semantics mode. Rather than always describing non-Oracle database columns as CHAR(n BYTE), this new feature describes them as CHAR(n CHAR) and VARCHAR(n CHAR). The concept is similar to Oracle Database CHAR Semantics.

• Multi-byte character sets ratio suppression

  This feature optionally suppresses the ratio expansion from the non-Oracle database involving multi-byte character set (for example, from US7ASCII to AL32UTF8, or from KO16MSWIN949 to KO16KSC5601). By default, Oracle Gateways assume the worst ratio to prevent data being truncated or insufficient buffer size situation.

• IPv6

  This release fully supports IPv6 between Oracle Database and Oracle Database gateways. For some gateways, IPv6 is also supported between Oracle Database gateways and the non-Oracle targets.

• Gateway IDLE timeout

  This release allows some Gateways to specify a session idle timeout limit. When a gateway session is idle for more than the specified time limit, the gateway session is terminated automatically with any pending update rolled back (if the gateway has the proper rollback capability).

Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) New Features

New features for Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) in the Oracle Database Heterogeneous Connectivity User's Guide include:

• Parallel data retrieval

  The Heterogeneous Services agent architecture was enhanced for parallel data retrieval from remote non-Oracle databases. With this feature, gateway customers experience improved elapsed time for data retrieval and load.

  This feature includes the new DBMS_HS_PARALLEL package. Four new procedures are introduced with this package:

  • LOAD_TABLE

    This procedure loads the data from a remote table to a local Oracle table in parallel. If the local Oracle table does not already exist, it is created automatically.

  • CREATE_TABLE_TEMPLATE

    This procedure writes out a CREATE TABLE template based on information gathered from the remote table. You can use the information to add any optimal Oracle CREATE TABLE clauses.

  • CREATE_OR_REPLACE_VIEW

    This procedure creates (or replaces) a read-only view to be referenced for retrieving the data from a remote table in parallel.

  • DROP_VIEW

    This procedure drops the view and internal objects created by the CREATE_OR_REPLACE_VIEW procedure. If the view has not already been created by the CREATE_OR_REPLACE_VIEW procedure, an error message is returned.

  See Also:

  Oracle Database PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference

• Optimizer interface improvements

  The statistics interface of Heterogeneous Services was enhanced to enable the Oracle optimizer to derive an equivalent execution plan for distributed SQL when dealing with a remote Oracle database and the agent. With this feature, customers experience similar or better elapsed time for distributed SQL across the gateways.