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Top 60 Oracle Blogs

November 2020

Faster software installations

Submitted by connor_mc_d on Tue, 2020-11-10 06:20

Just a quick tip today thanks to the one of the readers on my blog. If you’re installing Oracle 12c with the standard database installer, you’re probably used to that moment when the installation is ever so close to finishing and we just need to sync up the installation inventory. You’ll typically see the following screen.

Reader Ernie Kalwa reported some findings which I managed to reproduce, which can be summarised simply as:

The time to save the inventory seems to be proportional the number of files residing under the ORACLE_BASE directory structure.

What’s new with Oracle database 11.2.0.4.200714 versus 11.2.0.4.201020

Submitted by fritshoogland on Mon, 2020-11-09 19:18

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 11.2.0.4 PSU 200714 (july 2020) and PSU 201020 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the PSU impacts anything.

Functions

I wish

Submitted by Jonathan Lewis on Mon, 2020-11-09 12:01

Here’s a lovely little mechanism new to Postgres 13 that can minimise sorting costs: the “incremental sort”. It would be nice to see it in Oracle as well as it could make an enormous difference to “fetch first N” queries.

The concept is simple – if a rowsource moving up a plan is known to be in “partially sorted” order when it reaches a sort operation the optimizer can choose whether or not to sort the entire rowsource in one go or to sort it in batches as it arrives.

Video : Bind Variables : For Performance and Protection Against SQL Injection

Submitted by oraclebase on Mon, 2020-11-09 08:52

In today’s video we’ll discuss how using bind variables in your database applications can improve performance, and protect against SQL injection attacks.

This videos is based on a demo I do in one of my presentations, which was itself based on these articles.

What’s new with Oracle database 12.1.0.2.200714 versus 12.1.0.2.201020

Submitted by fritshoogland on Sun, 2020-11-08 09:56

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 12.1.0.2 PSU 200714 (july 2020) and PSU 201020 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the PSU impacts anything.

Functions

Oracle 19c: Adventures with Automatic Indexing

Submitted by davidkurtz on Fri, 2020-11-06 20:30

The video of this recent presentation, given as a part of the Oracle Groundbreakers EMEA Tour 2020, is now available.

Automatic Indexing is one of the much-heralded features of Oracle 19c, but it is only available on Engineered Systems, therefore in Autonomous Database that is built on Exadata and on other Exadata platforms. This presentation shares some initial experiences with the feature based on testing it in conjunction with Swingbench and discusses how well it performed.

Handling kernel upgrades with Ansible prior to an Oracle installation

Submitted by martin.bach on Fri, 2020-11-06 13:56

As part of the process of setting up VMs in the cloud for use with the Oracle database it is frequently necessary to update the systems to the latest and greatest, and hopefully more secure packages before the Oracle installation can begin. In a similar way I regularly upgrade the (cloud-vendor provided) base image when building a custom image using Packer. This demands for an automated process in my opinion, and Ansible is the right tool for me.

I may have mentioned once or twice that a Spacewalk powered (or equivalent) local repository is best for consistency. You may want to consider using it to ensure all systems are upgraded to the same packages. Applying the same package updates in production as you did in test (after successful regression testing of course) makes testing in lower-tier environments so much more meaningful ;)

Application Express – the PSE update

Submitted by connor_mc_d on Fri, 2020-11-06 02:07

I published a post a couple of days ago about how due to the architecture of PL/SQL and hence Application Express, we can rapidly deliver and deploy updates to the core APEX product to deliver timely fixes to the APEX community.

Because a single patch may now evolve over time to contain additional fixes, long time friend of the APEX community Peter Raganitsch then made the following observation on Twitter:

Oracle 19c: Real-Time Statistics & High-Frequency Statistics Collection

Submitted by davidkurtz on Thu, 2020-11-05 22:08

The video of this recent presentation, given as a part of the Oracle Groundbreakers EMEA Tour 2020, is now available.

Keeping object statistics up to date is critical to Oracle database performance and stability. Both of these features aim to address the challenge of using data that has been significantly updated before the statistics maintenance window has run again. The features are only available on engineered systems, and so certainly are targetted at the autonomous database.

About the oracle database and compiling and linking.

Submitted by fritshoogland on Thu, 2020-11-05 16:21

This blogpost is about how the oracle database executable created or changed during installation and patching. I take linux for the examples, because that is the version that I am almost uniquely working with. I think the linux operating is where the vast majority of linux installations are installed on, and therefore an explanation with linux is helpful to most of the people.

The first thing to understand is the oracle executable is a dynamically linked executable. This is easy to see when you execute the ‘ldd’ utility against the oracle executable: