Oracle Database 19c is now available!

Today, April 25th, Oracle Database 19c became available to downloaded from Oracle.com.

Oracle Database 19c is the final member of the 12.2 family a.k.a 12.2.0.3 and is, therefore, the ‘long term support’ release. This means it will come with 4 years of premium support and 3 years of extended support. Making this release the version of the database that most folks are going to upgrade to next.

So, what can you expect?

There are hundreds of useful enhancements in Oracle Database 19c as well as several new features. Dom Giles‘s latest post on the Oracle Database Insider blog has all the details on the new release, while I’ve listed just a couple of my personal favourites below.

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Oracle Launches TimesTen Scaleout!

What a week for announcements! First we had Oracle Database 18c available on-premises and now Oracle TimesTen Scaleout.

If you are not familiar with TimesTen, let me reminder you that it’s Oracle’s  In-Memory Database. In fact, it’s been a leading in-memory database for mission critical applications for over 20 years, and today they just launched an exciting new scalability feature called TimesTen Scaleout.

So, What is Scaleout?

TimesTen Scaleout is a distributed database, with a shared nothing architecture specifically designed to address real-time, transaction processing workloads. Think IoT, real-time trading, telecommunications billing or real-time fraud detection.

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Oracle Database 18c is now available for Download!

Today Oracle officially released Oracle Database 18c for download on Linux x86-64.

As you may recall, we originally released 18c on the Oracle Public Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems back in February.

So, when will you be able to get your hands on 18c on-premises for other platforms?

You can check the Oracle Support document 742060.1 for more details!

18c is the first version of the database to follow the new yearly release model and you can find more details on the release model change in the Oracle Support Document 2285040.1.

Before you freak out about the fact you haven’t even upgraded to 12.2, so how on earth are you ever going to get to 18c – Don’t Panic!

Oracle Database 18c is in fact “Oracle Database 12c Release 2 12.2.0.2”, the name has simply been changed to reflect the year in which the product is released.

So, what can you expect?

As you’d imagine a patchset doesn’t contain any seismic changes in functionality but there are lots of small but extremely useful incremental improvements, most of which focus on the three key marquee features in Oracle Database 12c Release2:

More details on what has changed in each of these areas and other improvements can be found in the Oracle Database blog post published by Dominic Giles or in the video below with Penny Avril, VP of Database Product Management.

You can also read all about the new features in the 18c documentation and you can try out Oracle Database 18c on LiveSQL.

 

How to determine which view to use

Often times DBAs or application architects create views to conceal complex joins or aggregations in order to help simplify the SQL queries developers need to write.  However, as an application evolves, and the number of views grow, it can often be difficult for a developer to know which view to use.

It also become easier for a developer to write an apparently simple query, that results in an extremely complex SQL statement being sent to the database, which may execute unnecessary joins or aggregations.

The DBMS_UTILITY.EXPAND_SQL_TEXT procedure, introduced in Oracle Database 12.1, allows developers to expand references to views, by turning them into subqueries in the original statement, so you can see just exactly what tables or views are being accessed and what aggregations are being used.

Let’s imagine we have been asked to determine the how many “Flat Whites” we sold in our coffeeshops this month. As a developer, I know I need to access the SALES table to retrieve the necessary sales data and the PRODUCTS table to limit it to just our “Flat Whites” sales but I also know that the DBA has setup a ton of views to make developers lives easier. In order to determine what views I have access to, I’m going to query the dictionary table USER_VIEWS.

SELECT  view_name 
FROM    user_views
WHERE   view_name LIKE '%SALES%';
 
VIEW_NAME
-------------------------------
SALES_REPORTING2_V
SALES_REPORTING_V

Based on the list of views available to me, I would likely pick the view called SALES_REPORTING_V or SALES_REPORTING2_V but which would be better?

Let’s use the DBMS_UTILITY.EXPAND_SQL_TEXT procedure to find out. In order to see the underlying query for each view, we can use is a simple “SELECT *” query from each view. First, we will try ‘SELECT * FROM sales_reporting_v‘.

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Overriding DBMS_STATS Parameter Settings

Since it’s introduction in Oracle Database 8i, the DBMS_STATS package is Oracle’s preferred method for gathering statistics. With each new database release the DBMS_STATS package is extended to accommodate new approaches to gather statistics and new types of statistics.

Over the years, application developers and DBAs have written hundreds of scripts using the DBMS_STATS package to help gather and manage optimizer statistics effectively. However, once written these scripts are rarely modified to take advantage of the improvements in the DBMS_STATS package, which can result in suboptimal statistics.

Oracle Database 12 Release 2 makes it a lot easier to be able to manage this vast collection of scripts by includes a new DBMS_STATS preference called PREFERENCE_OVERRIDES_PARAMETER. When this preference is set to TRUE, it allows preference settings to override the parameter values specifically set in a DBMS_STATS command.

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Oracle Database 12c and DevOps

Over the last month or so I’ve been on the road presenting at different user group conferences and meeting with customers. I’ve gotten a number of requests via blog comments to share the slides for the sessions I presented.

One of the most requested sessions is actually one I delivered, as a joint session with @GeraldVenzl, called Oracle Database 12c and DevOps.

In this session Gerald takes on the role of the lead developer on a project to deploy a RESTful web-based application, while I play the role of the DBA. Through the course of the session, we learn to work together to find a solution that will allow our (fictitious) company  to embrace a more agile development approach, as well as the latest technology trends without exposing the business to painful availability or security vulnerabilities.

Although the slides don’t do our witty repartee justice , hopefully they will inspire you to try out some of the technologies we describe in the session!

Below is the other session that I got a lot of requests for was the keynote session I gave at this year’s Georgia Oracle Users Group Tech Days 2017 , “What to expect from Oracle Database 12c”.

Longer Identifiers in Oracle Database 12c Release 2

Prior to Oracle Database 12c Release 2, all object names had been limited to just 30 bytes. This limitation lead to some interesting problems, especially if you wanted to use descriptive names for the database objects you were creating.

Take for example the dictionary tables we wanted to create in 12.1 to help manage SQL Plan Directives. The first table was DBA_SQL_PLAN_DIRECTIVES, with 23 characters, which wasn’t problem. However, the second table we wanted was DBA_SQL_PLAN_DIRECTIVES_OBJECTS.

Now that Oracle Database 12c Release 2 is available on-prem, I thought it would be a good time to remind folks about what they can expect from the new release. I’m going to divide topics into two categories, Marquee Features and top-tips. Let’s start with a top-tip!

Prior to Oracle Database 12c Release 2, all object names had been limited to just 30 bytes. This limitation lead to some interesting problems, especially if you wanted to use descriptive names for the database objects you were creating.

Take for example the dictionary tables we wanted to create in 12.1 to help manage SQL Plan Directives. The first table was DBA_SQL_PLAN_DIRECTIVES, with 23 characters, which wasn’t problem. However, the second table we wanted was DBA_SQL_PLAN_DIRECTIVES_OBJECTS.

Continue reading “Longer Identifiers in Oracle Database 12c Release 2”

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