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Oracle 10g Release 2
New Features Highlights

Oracle 10g release 2 has a particular focus on improving the ability of the database to use and manage computing grids many of the features for which were first introduced with Oracle 10 release 1 (although you could argue that some of the underlying technology stretches back to the 1980s with DEC's VAX clusters).

There are also improvements to reduce the total cost of ownership (an area in which Oracle has been under pressure in recent years from Microsoft), increase performance and manageability (particularly of large data warehouses) and improve security all of which are important issues for many if not all organisations using Oracle.

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Of course a lot of these areas overlap, improvements to performance means that hardware upgrades can be delayed thereby reducing costs, and database manageability improvements means DBA productivity should increase (all other things being equal), again reducing costs.

We'll only be looking at a few of the highlights here, see our Oracle resources section for links to more information.

Grid Enhancements

Let's look at the grid enhancements to start with. In this release, one ASM (Automatic Storage Management) instance can manage the storage requirements for both single-instance databases and RAC databases which can also be running different versions of Oracle. ASM is also now integrated with Enterprise Manager and the Database Creation Assistant. These changes make database configuration simpler, thereby reducing costs and the likelihood of serious problems making the database unavailable.

Other changes in this area include the separation of the Oracle clustering software from Oracle RAC and enabling the automatic fail over of non-Oracle applications. The installation, configuration and management of clusters has also been simplified by the provision of a cluster verification utility that performs an initial check of the required cluster elements. Load balancing has also been improved and now reacts more quickly to changes in the work load of individual nodes in the cluster.

Application Enhancements

Oracle 10g release 2 includes many improvements for application development including changes to HTML DB (now called Application Express) which now has:

a new wizard for creating master-detail forms without any coding;
a simplified Create Application wizard which also produces better applications;
additional chart types in the chart wizard;
and support for larger data sets when loading text or spread-sheet data.

Windows Integration Enhancements

Support for MS Windows has been improved with the ability for Oracle to store .Net procedures in the database (in the same way as PL/SQL and Java procedures can be stored) and with a new Visual Studio wizard to handle the data-type mapping and generate the PL/SQL wrapper code for .Net stored procedures automatically.

Security Enhancements

One of the security enhancements is a new feature called Transparent Data Encryption which enables sensitive data to be encrypted automatically in the database without having to make any changes to applications. The encryption algorithms supported include AES 192 and Triple DES.

To use this feature, a master key is generated and used to encrypt the encryption key for each table containing encrypted data, thereby ensuring that no encryption keys are held in plain text and preventing anyone without the master key from decrypting the data. The master key is stored externally in a security module such as Oracle Wallet and access can be restricted to the security administrator, ensuring that no one person has access to all data.

Manageability Enhancements

The last new feature we'll discuss here is the new database replay utility, which is designed to make testing easier when adding new hardware or migrating to new versions of software, particularly the Oracle software.

The idea of this utility is to capture the actual workload of a production database and then replay all the queries, updates etc. on a test system that has the new configuration, so that the impact of hardware and/or software changes can be tested to ensure there are no performance or other issues before the production system is upgraded. For Oracle 10g release 2, only the ability to capture the workload is provided - you have to wait for Oracle 11g to be able to replay the workload.

Conclusion

There are many more changes in Oracle 10g release 2 that could be mentioned but time and space don't permit. However this should give you an idea of some of the more important changes. For more details go to our Oracle resources section which has links to the Oracle 10g release 2 new features documentation and other sources of information.

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