This past week I attended an Oracle half day session about 11g with the Key note speaker being Tome Kyte. I thought I would take my note and apply then to my blog in preparation of going to Oracle Open World in a couple of week. I am also trying something a little different by writing my totes in an email message and sending to the blog to be posted… We will see how it goes.
This is just a summary of my notes. I should be receiving the Power Point presentations soon.
The topic of his presentation was “Oracle Database 11g – What does this mean” which covered some interesting topics and, as usual for Tom Kyte, was entertaining and informative. Some of the highlights included:
Oracle Data Masking Irreversible De-identification – This will allow the ability to create test environments and masking sensitive information, (credit card, social security numbers) with realistic but non-factual values allowing production data to be safely used in development. This is not just creating “dummy” data but values appear to be valid.
Use Standby Database for Testing – The physical standby can be used as a test environment by creating a restore point before doing the test then after testing flashback to the restore point and put the standby in managed recovery mode.
Some words of wisdom that Tom referred to when making a change:
1. The change does nothing ( good or bad )
2. The change causes something bad to happen
3. The change causes something good to happen
The Database Replay functionality of Oracle 11g allows you to capture workloads on a production system and replay them exactly as they happened on a test system. This provides an accurate method to test the impact of a variety of system changes including:
· Database upgrades.
· Operating system upgrades or migrations.
· Configuration changes, such as changes to initialization parameters or conversion from a single node to a RAC environment.
· Hardware changes or migrations.
Configuration management is an add-on for Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control..
I attended a session related to upgrading to Oracle 11g given by Roy Swonger. One important document/web site is the Oracle upgrade companion which can be accessed here: ( it only works in IE but PDF’s and HTML can be downloaded)
Many Meta Link references were listed in the presentation for sources of the upgrade( 785351.1, 837570.1, 421191.1)
At a high level the following steps should be performed in an upgrade
1. Install software in new home
2. Apply newest patch set update (PSU)
3. Apply any recommended patches
4. Apply patches for known issues
5. Start the database upgrade
Note: When doing the install of the Oracle software do not select the option to do the upgrade too. The software should be installed first, patched, and then the upgrade can be completed.
Also, Roy recommended downloading the software from http://edelivery.oracle.com and not otn.oracle.com because on edelivery it is more current and can be connected back to a license agreement or CSI.
One thing that I found interesting was it is OK to install options and link them into the build but it does not mean you have to pay for them. The options can be linked into the engine but you must pay for them when you use them.
Golden gate was mentioned as an option for an upgrade process to reduce the amount of downtime. In the presentation it was mentioned that Golden Gate was 5X faster than Oracle streams for replication and does not have the inherent problems of streams. I have a hands on lab at Oracle Open World with Golden Gate. From the limited reading I have done I see some real benefit with this especially if multiple database vendors are part of the mix in the organization.
In the afternoon Tom Kyte gave another presentation on some SQL Techniques and in Tom Kyte fashion gave some very detailed and interesting examples of how SQL can be modified to increase performance. He gave some excellent examples of using scalar subqueries to reduce the number of IO calls to the database.
Again, this is just some highlights from my notes and I wanted to test creating a blog post with email. Next test may be with my BlackBerry.
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