Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.1) New Features in the Administrator's Guide

• Oracle Restart improves database availability by automatically restarting the database after a failure.

  If you configure Oracle Restart, then the database, the listener, the Oracle Automatic Storage Management instance, and other Oracle components can be automatically restarted after a hardware or software failure or after a restart of the database host computer.

  See Chapter 4, "Configuring Automatic Restart of an Oracle Database".

• Edition-based redefinition enables application developers and DBAs to upgrade an application with little or no application down time.

  A new database construct called an edition provides a privacy mechanism for installing new code and for making data changes so that the running production application does not see the changes. When all the required changes have been made in private, they can be made available to users. In support of edition-based redefinition, a new kind of view called an editioning view and a new kind of trigger called a crossedition trigger are introduced.

  See "Managing Editions".

• Database Smart Flash Cache

  Database Smart Flash Cache is an optional memory component that you can add if your database is running on Solaris or Oracle Linux. It is an extension of the SGA-resident buffer cache, providing a level 2 cache for database blocks. It can improve response time and overall throughput.

  See "Memory Architecture Overview".

• The Automatic Segment Advisor can now return a recommendation to use OLTP compression for a table.

  See "Reclaiming Wasted Space".

• Deferred segment creation

  When creating a nonpartitioned heap-organized table in a locally managed tablespace, table segment creation is deferred until the first row is inserted.

  See "Understand Deferred Segment Creation".

• Oracle Database File System

  The Oracle Database File System creates a standard file system interface on top of files and directories that are stored in database tables.

  See Oracle Database SecureFiles and Large Objects Developer's Guide for complete information.

• Oracle Scheduler enhancements

  • Remote database jobs—You can now create a job that runs stored procedures and anonymous PL/SQL blocks on another database instance on the same host or on a remote host. The target database can be any release of Oracle Database.

    See "Database Jobs".

  • Multiple-destination jobs—You can now run a job on multiple locations, and control and monitor all instances of the job from one central database. You do so by specifying multiple destinations when you create the job. A destination can be the local host or local database; a remote host (for remote external jobs); or a remote database (for remote database jobs).

    See "Multiple-Destination Jobs"

  • File watchers—A new Scheduler object called a file watcher simplifies the task of configuring the Scheduler to start a job upon the arrival of a file on the local or a remote system.

    See "Starting a Job When a File Arrives on a System".

  • E-mail notifications—You can configure the Scheduler to automatically send an e-mail notification to one or more recipients when a specified job state event occurs. You can now receive an e-mail when a job completes, if it fails or is disabled, if it exceeds its allotted run time, and so on.

    See "Monitoring Job State with E-mail Notifications".

• Database Resource Manager Enhancements

  • Instance caging

    Oracle Database now provides a method for managing CPU allocations on a multi-CPU server running multiple database instances. Instance caging limits the maximum number of CPUs that any one database instance can use. If an instance then becomes CPU-bound, the Resource Manager begins allocating CPU based on the current resource plan. Thus, instance caging and the Resource Manager work together to support desired levels of service across multiple instances.

    See "Managing Multiple Database Instances on a Single Server".

  • New MAX_UTILIZATION_LIMIT attribute of resource plan directives enables you to impose an absolute upper limit on CPU utilization for a resource consumer group. This absolute limit overrides any automatic redistribution of CPU within a plan.

  • New ORACLE_FUNCTION consumer group mapping rule type, and new predefined mapping rules for Data Pump and RMAN.

    Sessions performing a data load with Data Pump or performing backup or copy operations with RMAN are now automatically mapped to predefined consumer groups.

    See "Predefined Consumer Group Mapping Rules".

  • New sample resource plans and resource consumer groups to support data warehousing operations with Oracle Exadata

    See "Predefined Resource Plans and Consumer Groups".

• New SQL command syntax for specifying table compression for direct load operations only or for all (OLTP) operations.

  See "Consider Using Table Compression".

• The Flash Recovery Area is renamed to Fast Recovery Area.

• External tables can be preprocessed by user-supplied preprocessor programs.

  By using a preprocessing program, users can use data from a file that is not in a format supported by the access driver. For example, a user may want to access data stored in a compressed format. Specifying a decompression program for the ORACLE_LOADER access driver allows the data to be decompressed as the access driver processes the data.

  See "Preprocessing External Tables".

• Archive logging now supports up to 30 standby databases.

• IP version 6 is now supported.

  Oracle Database components and utilities now support Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses, which are 128 bits in length. You can now specify an IPv6 address with the easy connect method in SQL*Plus.

  See "Connecting to the Database with SQL*Plus".

• Redo logs can now be stored on disk drives with a sector size of 4K bytes without performance degradation.

  A new redo log file block size of 4K bytes enables online redo logs to be stored on newer high-capacity disks with a 4K byte sectors size without incurring performance degradation. The new block size ensures that log file writes are sector-aligned.

  See "Planning the Block Size of Redo Log Files".

• The Enterprise Manager Support Workbench, a component of the fault diagnosability infrastructure, now supports investigating, reporting, and resolving critical errors in Oracle Automatic Storage Management instances.

  See Chapter 9, "Managing Diagnostic Data".