Well, I make that about 4 weeks since I installed 11.1.0.7 on my laptop on, yes, Vista but the weeks have flown by and I’ve only had a very quick play with it.
It was released along with another few ports that I was surprised to see appear so quickly, specifically AIX. As I’m working at an AIX site at the moment, I’m used to the long wait for ‘Tier 2′ ports to appear. It’s usually about 6 months minimum. In a fit of wild speculation based on no solid information, I’d venture that the Linux port was ready long ago but was held back for Openworld as part of the Exadata announcement, which meant that the other porting teams caught up and were able to release soon after Openworld. As I said, wild speculation, but most of the Exadata blog posts I’ve seen in the past month seem to be similarly uninformed which is all the more surprising when there are plenty of white papers online. Frankly, you’d think if someone sets themself up as an industry analyst, they would take the time to read public information before they start spouting opinions. I suppose that’s probably why I’ll never make it as an industry analyst.
So what’s in 11g that would have given some of the Exadata game away if it had been released before Openworld? Here are a few little fun details.
Because of the OEM performance presentations and the course, one of the first things I do is take a look at DB Control for any new update (and I need to remember to respond to Noon’s post one day soon). At the bottom of the main Performance Page for the instance in the 11g screens is a tabbed section that includes an I/O tab which is one of the most noticeable improvements in 11g.
What may or may not be obvious from a small graphic is that the first of the I/O types listed in the key in the right hand side is ‘Smart Scan’, but I don’t expect I’ll be seeing that appearing in graphs on my laptop any time soon 
While I was at it, I thought I’d see if there were any Exadata-related parameters or timed events.
SYS@TEST11> select name, value from v$parameter 2 where name like '%cell%'; NAME----------------------------------------VALUE--------------------------------------------------------------------------------cell_partition_large_extentsDEFAULTcell_offload_processingTRUEcell_offload_parameters cell_offload_compactionADAPTIVEcell_offload_plan_displayAUTO SYS@TEST11> select name, wait_class from v$event_name where name like '%cell%'; NAME WAIT_CLASS---------------------------------------- --------------------cell smart table scan User I/Ocell smart index scan User I/Ocell statistics gather User I/Ocell smart incremental backup System I/Ocell smart file creation User I/Ocell smart restore from backup System I/Ocell single block physical read User I/Ocell multiblock physical read User I/OStreams miscellaneous event Other 9 rows selected.
Just a bit of fun, but nowhere near as much fun as Real Time SQL Monitoring. Now *that’s* a feature worth upgrading for!