4th. and final Day at the Oracle Open World.

This was the last day and you kind of wish for it, the information you get here is very interesting but after receiving such amount of information day after day at the end of the week you are totally burn out. One thing that I noticed and I recommend is to bring a digital camera, sit close to the screen and take pictures of the slides. It is impossible to take notes and pay attention to what the presenter is saying, most of them talk too fast and the slides are shown just for few seconds, you don’t even have time to read them much less take notes out of them. It is like a race they want to cover as much as they can in 90 min.

My first session was “Fault diagnostic best practices, what every DBA must know about Oracle11g by Prabhaker Gongloor”. Oracle is changing the architecture where your log and trace files are stored, there is an new incident, trace and metadata directory. Oracle introduced a new parameter diagnostic_dest that when set it places your log file traces as well as other debugging files on that directory. If you don't set this parameter it would be set to your ORACLE_BASE, if ORACLE_BASE is not set then it would be set to your ORACLE_HOME. The new view v$diag_info contain all the locations for the different directories.

There is a new enterprise manager "support workbench" to support all this new architecture. This includes Incident Packaging Services (IPS). IPS uses the new directory structure to automate packaging of diagnostic data. It solves the problem of what to send to support. The new EM also offers 11g Health monitoring which helps you find problems before they impact the service.

Background_dump_dest is deprecated as well as user_dump_dest; however core_dump_dest still exist. Oracle new alert.log is in XML format however Oracle is still providing the alert.log in text format in case you have a program that uses the text format.

Also in 11g the RDBMS automatically purges your trace files, reducing the possibility for traces to fill up your disk. The Automatic diagnostic repository stores diagnostic data in a hierarchy directory.

My second session was “What is new in Oracle Transparent Data Encryption by Daniel Wong”. Oracle did a strong effort to improve this tool but the main characteristic is the Tablespace encryption, now you don't have to guess what data to encrypt as you can encrypt a complete tablespace. There is not issues in having encrypted partition tables or an encrypted parent table with references on a unencrypted child table, etc.

My third session was “Best Practices for Upgrading to Oracle Database 11g by Ravi Pattabhi” Ravi basically went through the different ways to execute the upgrade.

- Manual using Database upgrade assistant.

- Automatic using the Database upgrade assistant.

- Data pump export and import.

Oracle introduced since 10g (I believe it was 10g) a set of scripts that you run before the upgrade (pre-upgrade info tool and pre-upgrade analysis tool) and it tells you all the possible problems you may face if you upgrade. There is also a post-upgrade script that you can run to verify that everything was correct. If you are using RAC or ASM, you need to address the clusterware and ASM upgrade before you upgrade the database.

There is a new dba_registry view in 11g that helps you with the upgrade process , only real errors are spooled during the upgrade. There is even in Metalink a white paper that helps you to minimize downtime during the upgrade.

At then end of the presentation Ravi went through the print screen slides of the upgrade process using DBUA (DB Upgrade Assistant). If you have upgraded from 10gR1 to 10gR2 it is basically the same screens you are familiar with. Ravi suggested to test your upgrade (Any intelligent DBA does this anyway) use RMAN to clone you production database and test the upgrade in the clone database. Database control and grid control offers a variety of tools that help you measure the effect of upgrading to 11g for your application. If you are going to do the manual upgrade automate as much as you can so you minimize human errors.

My last session was “Oracle Database 10g tuning arsenal by John Kanagaraj" John basically went through the efficient use of AWR (Advance workdload repository) and ADDM (Advance Diagnostic Manager) which are features we currently use therefore I will not elaborate on it.

In conclusion it is my personal opinion that in 11g Oracle took an step back to improve and fix all the nice features they launched in 10g. There were comments from presenters saying that they believe 11g is the most stable beta Oracle has ever produced and I admire and congratulate Oracle for just taking the time to mature their product.

I hope you enjoyed this overview at the Oracle Openworld 2007

Rafael Orta