11.2 Release

Some features in this post require a Diagnostics Pack license.

I noticed my Netvibes home page light up today with the release of 11.2 on OTN (Greg's is just one of a bunch of posts) - official home page here.

More important to me was the documentation and there were two things that I dived straight into.

1) Parallel Query, because I saw a presentation somewhere that suggested there have been a few changes here and the 'What's New in Performance' section seems to indicate that. I'll need a much closer look.

2) ASH. As something that's still relatively young in Oracle terms, ASH development seems to move ahead at a pace. There are a bunch of new columns in 11gR1 that I talk about on the course (not least the SQL Execution Plan Line details) but I was pretty shocked by the number of new columns in 11gR2 and will need to play around with them to work out the more valuable. The good thing about ASH (at the moment) is that it's such a simple and elegant feature, that simply looking at the columns suggests new uses. Quite a few jumped out, particularly as me and my mate Jari had been talking about this just the other week when he'd been bemoaning the lack of a feature to give him session-level history of temporary space usage (he works on a very busy DW). If only he had 11.2

This post also gives me a chance to clear up a housekeeping matter that's been on my To Do list for a few weeks. Every time I blog about anything that requires a Diagnostics Pack license, sure enough, someone will mention that in the comments. I decided long ago that I wasn't going to drag out the debate any longer and would focus on the technical benefits but I've changed my mind a little. I'm not going to drag out the debate, but I do think a simple 'Features in this post require a Diagnostics Pack license' would both make the posts less likely to mislead and, hopefully, reduce the understandable desire of people to post a 'yeah, but you need to pay Oracle extra for this' comment. It will probably take quite a while to back-port the change, but I'll do my best.

On a similar note and because I wanted to tuck this down the bottom of a post and not make it too self-congratulatory, I'm now one of those Oracle Ace Director things. Thanks to various people for that, not least Marco who made some pretty convincing arguments I'm sure that means there will be occasions when Oracle are paying my travel and accommodation expenses (outside of the obvious cases where I'm doing teaching work for them). When that happens, I'll include a note to that effect so people can decide whether I'm being bribed or not! (Frankly, they had me with that red fleece!)

Honestly, those new ASH columns have got me excited. How sad is that?!?