Oracle database 11g available now on Linux & Windows

Oracle 11g database software is downloadable from edelivery  as well from Oracle Technology Network for the following platforms:

Linux x86 (as of August 14th. 2007)
Linux x86-64bit ( October 30th. 2007)
Windows 32 bit ( October 25th. 2007)

Is your Oracle database software a fully supported version?

 ”Did you know that you should not download Oracle software from Oracle Technology Network in order to use it for production? If you do so you might not have full support!!!” This was new for me and I was very surprised when an Oracle Sales Consultant explained this to me recently. As he pointed out to me the only official place which you can use to download officially fully supported software is Oracle Edelivery !!! On this site you can download any Oracle product that is currently available to license.

I have doublechecked again about this statement and have contacted Oracle Pre-Sales in Switzerland in order to find out what is the truth.
A Pre-Sales manager in Switzerland asured me that it is not critical from where you down  load and it is not relevant for support where you got the software from, OTN or edelivery. Nevertheless, there is not always the same software available on both sites.

O.K., this relativates the first statement and I can sleep more comfortable again.

 This is what OTN tells us about the downloads from there:
On OTN software downloads are free, and each comes with a Development License that allows you to use full versions of the products only while developing and prototyping your applications (or for strictly self-educational purposes). 

Read it carefully!

=;-) 

wordpress blogs blocked in Turkey

My wordpress blog is not accessible through a number of DNSs in Istanbul.

Obviousely wordpress.com is banned by the censor of the Turkish state.

Arrived in Istanbul again

Yesterday I arrived in Istanbul again. It is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen.  Although it is raining today
I just love to be here! I am staying in a hotel in Maslak which is new business district with a very high growth rate. There are new high buildings appearing at the speed of mushrooms in autumn.

This week I will deliver a course on Oracle 11g New Features for Administrators at the site of a delivery partner of Oracle Education Turkey.

My top 10 Oracle 11g New Features Part 5: DDL-logging in the alert log in 11g

This week I deliver for Oracle Belgium in Brussels.
It is an 11g New Features for Administrators course.
I have shown some nice features this afternoon
which are not really documented yet
and want to share some of it here.

As of Oracle database 11g we can have loggin information for DDL operations in the alert log files. I say files in plural because we have two different alert log files now in 11g:
one is the traditional alert_<sid>.log as we had it ever since,
the other one is an log.xml file which is located in the diagnostic directory in the alert folder. The xml file gives you a lot more information than the traditional alert log file.

The diagnostic directory is specified by the parameter DIAGNOSTIC_DEST  in 11g which depricates all the *_DUMP_DEST parameters from older releases. It defaults to $ORACLE_BASE/diag/

This feature can be very handy because it shows a logging entry for every DDL statement with a timestamp in the two alert log files. You will like it if you must find out when the wrong table was dropped or truncated ecactly in order to flash it back.

It is not enabled by default and you must change the parameter to TRUE first in 11gR1. 

Here is a little demo:

ALTER SYSTEM SET enable_ddl_logging=TRUE SCOPE=BOTH; SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> show parameter ddlNAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
———————————— ———– ——————————
ddl_lock_timeout                     integer     0
enable_ddl_logging                   boolean     TRUE  

[oracle@edw2r8p0 ~]$ tail -f /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/orcl/orcl/alert/log.xml

<txt>drop table hr.tt 
</txt></msg>
<msg time=’2007-10-16T15:29:58.343+02:00′ org_id=’oracle’ comp_id=’rdbms’ msg_id=’opiexe:3933:4222364190′ client_id=” type=’NOTIFICATION’ group=‘schema_ddl’ level=’16′ module=’SQL*Plus’ pid=’27158′> <txt>drop table t
 </txt>
</msg> Here is the same tail for the traditional alert_<sid>.log: Tue Oct 16 15:29:58 2007drop table tNice one, eh?
=;-) 

Interview with Günther Stürner (V.P. Oracle Germany)

On June 14th.I had the chance to talk to Günther Stürner from Germany and ask him a few questions about the new Oracle Release during the celebration of the 20th. anniversary of the Swiss Oracle User Group SOUG in Luzern.

Günther Stürner is Vice President Sales Consulting and head of the Business Unit Server Technologies of ORACLE Germany. He is responsible for the entire database and middleware business in Germany.
Günther Stürner is one of the Oracle employees who were already inside the company from the very beginning in Germany. I have published this interview in the SOUG Newsletter 4/2007 and want to share it here:

sysdba:

Oracle 11g will be released shortly and we will take another giant step into the direction of the Self Managing Database. Tasks a DBA in Oracle 10g had to perform manually will now be automatically managed by the server. One of the highlights in 11g surely is Automatic SQL Tuning.
The optimizer now has the chance to automatically create SQL-profiles and also automatically implement them if the calculated COSTs are lower than those of previous executions of the same statement.Does this meen for us DBAs that Statement Tuning is not necessary at all with Oracle 11g?

G.S.

Questions like these have already been asked when Oracle 10g was released. I clearly remember a 10g meeting  where one of the delegates after my speech said :’… I have the impression that you want to make quite a number of us unemployed…’.   This was a very understandable reaction if you think of what we were claiming.
It is only that reality is quite different: in real life the number of production systems grows fast and at the same time the complexity of the applications and systems dramatically increases. Also the field of competences of the DBAs extends largely.This is why the number of DBA does not shrink, only the typical work of a DBA changes a lot.It is exactly the same with tuning: the new possibilities just make things easier for us and also make new options possible. Nowadays it is almost impossible to manually tune complex SQL-statements for example in analytical contexts. Without the support of the system it would be very difficult to troubleshoot things, even for very experienced DBAs.To get back to the question: we will still have to tune only that we now have an even better and more enhanced support by the server. This will lead us to dramatically improved tuning results with at the same time much less effort we will have to make to get there.  To my mind there should be no Oracle Systems running without OEM-Diagnostic- and without EM-Tuning-Pack any more.

sysdba:

As you mention the OEM packages I would like to ask you a question about licensing policies: In the past there was a lot of fuzz about the OEM packages. I am talking especially about Diagnostics Pack, Tuning Pack and Change Management Pack.
These packages are only combinable with Enterprise Edition but they are available in all Oracle versions. It is only that we may not use them without a license for Enterprise Edition plus an additional license for each of these packages. Oracle itself uses them for self diagnostic tasks internally in all editions.
What many DBAs do not know is that you they these packages implicitly not only when they utilize certain wizards in the Enterprise Manager but also if they only query certain V$-Views or by running certain scripts  from $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin or call some procedures with certain parameter values.
A lot of customers do not even know about these facts and I think that quite a number of them are permanently in danger of being under licensed by using the packages implicitly.  There is even a petition to Oracle available  in the web which has been joined by a large number of highly reputed people already.
Will the Enterprise Manager Packages be available for all editions in the future?

G.S. 

This topic has a long history of discussion and has been addresse also by us again and again. Actually there there is no plan to make these packages available also for SE oder SE1.

sysdba:

There are a number of very promising features coming up especially in the field of  Change Management in Oracle 11g.
Now it is possible to rerun a previously recorded workload in a testing environment under real conditions before changes are implemented on production.
What are the most important use cases for Real Application Testing to your mind?  

G.S.

‘Never touch a running system’ is what people always say after a change to the system has caused problems. But IT-systems are subject to permanent changes and those changes are not an exceptional case but the normal procedure! We permanently have to apply changes not only the operation systems but also to the database systems, the hardware configuration or the components of the infrastructure.At the same time the number of systems which are constraint by hard SLAs increases dramatically.
It is almost impossible for anyone to change a production system without extensive testing in front. The number of simulation tests after the implementation of changes to a database system has increases enormously in the past two years.
This is where Real Application Testing comes in very handy – which is a new 11g-option by the way. It enables us to run and analyze realistic workloads on a production system and re-run them on a new target platform without the need of additional software for the simulation. We can now compare and analyze the deltas for performance metrics for the same workload on different systems. Changes to critical  systems should never be allowed without testing under real conditions.

sysdba:

With respect to storage there are a lot of new features in Oracle 11g.
ASM can now handle multiple extent sizes not only for different datafiles, the extent size can even vary within files.
Also ASM can perform automatic defragmentation and open files much faster than in 10g.
Other 11g highlights are Preferred Mirror Readin order to prevent a permanent shifting of ASM extents across the interconnect in a  stretched-cluster and Fast Mirror Resync which is used to prevent that ASM disks get automatically gedropped if they are temporarily not availableWill we be able to store other file types in ASM in the future? I think of the Cluster Registry, Voting Disk, the Oracle binaries ($ORACLE_HOME) and maybe even other files. There have been rumours about a Posix File System in ASM around in the past.

G.S.

There will be a number of very interesting new features in the field of storage in the near future. ASM new features in 11g as well as other new trends about storage in general.
We will publish further details on these in the next weeks and months.
New storage features in 11g which are non ASM features are among others the compression-Option in 11g which will certainly be very interesting for many of our customers because now  compression is not only a feature for data warehouses any more but is usable for any application profile:
less disk usage, faster compression-algorithms, more efficient memory management, de-duplication for files stored inside the database, compression for RMAN-Backups and compression in Data Guard contexts make this option highly interesting for many customers.

sysdba:

Thank you very much for this interview Günther.
We are all looking forward to the results of the first real life tests

SOUG Newsletter with my articles published

Yesterday I have received the latest issue of the
Newsletter of Swiss Oracle User Group (SOUG). 4/2007

It contains two contributions from me:
- an interview with Oracle Vice President Guenther Stuerner from Germany about 11g which I have made on the 20th. aniversary of SOUG this year in Luzern (not posted here yet, but soon).
- an article about some new features for the Cost Based Optimizer in 11g which I have already published here on my blog a while ago.

 Hope you like it,

=,-)

11g course for Switzerland confirmed

Oracle University has confirmed the
11g New Features five day course
starting on November 5th. in Zurich.

I will deliver this class and
I am looking foreward to meeting you there.

=;-)

Going OOW

Last week I have received the confirmation for my Full Conference Pass for the Oracle Open World Conference in November in San Francisco.
I had booked a hotel already half a year ago and yesterday I have made my reservation for the flights.

I think it will be a busy week and I hope to meet some people who had promised to come.

I will not deliver a speach about 11g Change Management as I had planned. Somehow the European Usergroup did not find the topic interesting enough. So let’s see what they have in place instead.

=;-)