Surely, you are thinking, 11.2 consists of more than this. Certainly it does. The major new feature in 11.2 is "edition-based redefinition," which (according to the doc) " enables you to upgrade the database component of an application while it is in use, thereby minimizing or eliminating down time."
 
This is REALLY BIG NEWS. You can now "hot patch" your application code, which means that Oracle is finally and truly a 24x7 database platform. This feature will have a big impact on application architects and some impact on PL/SQL developers, but there is actually very little change in the PL/SQL language itself.
 
And now for the biggest news of all: now that Oracle has officially released 11.2, O'Reilly can publish the 5th edition of Oracle PL/SQL Programming. This edition has lots of good stuff in it, but most important are: 

• Optimize PL/SQL performance with the aid of a brand-new chapter in the fifth edition;
• Understand and use new Oracle Database 11g features, including the edition-based redefinition capability, the function result cache, the new CONTINUE statement, fine-grained dependency tracking, sequences in PL/SQL expressions, supertype invocation from subtypes, and enhancements to native compilation, triggers, and dynamic SQL;
• Use new Oracle Database 11g tools and techniques such as PL/Scope, the PL/SQL hierarchical profiler, and the SecureFiles technology for large objects.

• Coding Therapy for Developers
• Automated Testing Options for PL/SQL
• Why You Should Care About Oracle11g - Right Now

We're excited to announce that Christian Antognini will be conducting a class for us in 2010! Christian wrote the very popular book Troubleshooting Oracle Performance, and will be teaching a class based on the book.

I don't know about you, but I like to work with the PDF version of the documentation. The problem is that the PDF files have names that are not very useful (or do you remember that the SQL Reference Guide is named e10592.pdf?). Hence, when I download the documentation, I like to store each PDF with its title as a file name. In addition, for easy access, I put them under the My Documents menu. The following image shows how it looks like on my laptop.

 

• opened the master book list
• extracted the HTML code associated to the table containing the list of PDF files
• applied a small XSL transformation to generate a script that downloads all files
• executed the script

In this way, I just had to start the script, and about 10 minutes later the whole documentation library was stored locally. Note that with such a script it is also very simple to periodically re-download all files. Just to keep them up-to-date. 

•   adgncons.sql
•   adcrtbsp.sql
  •   Generated by adgncons.sql, this script creates the new tablespaces
•   adgrants.sql (same adgrants.sql as 5726010 120.21)
  •   Grants SYS privileges needed by Applications, and creates required views in SYS.

      After completing the DB Upgrade, the initialization parameters are updated in the pfile, and the spfile is created:

As the oracle user, run the following:

sqlplus "/as sysdba"

shutdown immediate

startup pfile='/home/d01/oracle/vis/db/tech_st/10.2.0/dbs/initVIS.ora

create spfile from pfile;

A common fatal mistake is to start the instance with the old (9206) pfile. This issue was encountered because we neglected to create a new spfile from the pfile before starting the applications upgrade patch. As a result, when the upgrade patch encountered an error and we needed to exit the patch, trying to restart the patch resulted in this error. 

 

• Client Timezone default - can be overridden by the Regional User Preference - Timezone
• Server Timezone - set to the location of the server
• Concurrent: Multiple Time Zones - Set to Yes. This allows the Concurrent Manager to recognize that a job submitted by Kelly in Logan, Utah, scheduled to run at 10PM, is interpreted as scheduled to run at 12 midnight EST, in Pittsburgh, where the servers are located.

 

 

Oracle is actually returning correct results, its just that sometimes the people asking the questions haven't realized that COUNT(column) is something semantically different from COUNT(*).

COUNT(*) operation counts all rows fed to it by execution plan branch under it.

COUNT(column) operation on the other hand counts all non-null values in that column from rows fed to it by execution plan branch under it.

And here's a little example:

SQL> select count(*) from v$session;

 COUNT(*)
----------
        23
 
SQL> select count(username) from v$session;

COUNT(USERNAME)
---------------
              1  <<-- only one non-null value in that column
 
SQL> select count(nvl(username,'blah')) from v$session; <<-- lets replace NULLs with non-nulls

COUNT(NVL(USERNAME,'BLAH'))
---------------------------
                         23

• Develop a disaster recovery plan for your Oracle database to meet your organization's requirements
• Configure and deploy Oracle Data Guard for your environment
• Tune and troubleshoot your physical and logical standby databases
• Implement the Oracle Data Guard Broker management framework
• Integrate with Oracle Grid Control
• Monitor your Oracle Data Guard environment
• Enable read-only services and disaster recovery with Oracle Active Data Guard
• Configure seamless database and application failover
• Minimize planned downtime using Oracle Data Guard switchover
• Handle backup and recovery with Oracle Recovery Manager