Oracle XE 12c?

There was a post on Oracle-L asking about Oracle Express Edition (XE) 12c. I started to write a reply, but thought a blog post may be more appropriate.

Oracle XE 12c doesn’t exist yet, but people at OpenWorld 2015 confirmed they “plan” to have one. As always, no promises. So when will it arrive? Typically the XE version is put together based on the the first major patchset of release 2 of a version. So the kind of thing you might expect is,

  • 12.2.0.1 : Released mid 2016 maybe.
  • 12.2.0.2 : Released mid 2017 maybe.
  • XE team brought together: Some time after 12.2.0.2 release.
  • XE Released: When it is built and stable.

Things to consider, based on stuff I’ve heard over the last few years.

  • There is no XE team. People are taken from their normal jobs to put this together and test it. There is no revenue generation directly associated with this product, so it’s not at the top of the priority list.
  • There are no patches for XE, so they wait until they have a stable release they can rely on for the 3-6 years before the next release 2 DB version.
  • Previous versions of XE have had bits of functionality missing/disabled, so it’s not just rolling out SE with some restrictions.
  • Other products in the Oracle stack are moving to more regular release cycles (3 months to cloud, with a yearly on-premise release). Comments from the database team suggest this is not the case for the database. As it gets more complicated, the testing takes longer, so the release cycles are getting longer. They originally said they wanted an 18 month release cycle for the database. 12cR1 took about 3 years to arrive. It looks like 12cR2 will arrive about 3 years after 12cR1. If that cycle continues, it would mean about a 6 year wait between XE releases, unless they change tack.

Of course, this is all just me thinking out loud. No facts have been presented here! 🙂

I think Oracle XE is a really important product for Oracle, even though it doesn’t directly make them money. Think of it as a gateway drug. XE makes it easy and cheap for people to try stuff with Oracle. If those projects grow, that could be additional licensing of SE2, EE or cloud subscriptions in the future. Without it, people will look elsewhere for their cheap starting point and may never make a move to Oracle later!

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 23 and Oracle 11gR2/12cR1

A few months ago I mentioned doing some Fedora 22 installations. At the time I did some pre-emptive installations on the Alpha release of Fedora 23 also.

Now the final release of Fedora 23 is out, I’ve run through the articles again to make sure things are all ship-shape.

It’s pretty much as it was before, with the nice bonus that the “MATE Desktop” package group has been fixed. Happy days! 🙂

As always, installations of Oracle server products on Fedora are not a great idea, as explained here.

If you do like playing with this stuff, knock yourself out… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Multitentant (Pluggable Database) Videos

It’s been over 2 years since 12c was released and there still seems to be a lot of confusion about the pluggable database stuff. I think most people know the top-level concept, there’s only so many times you can see the memory stick analogy before it gets burned on your skull, but that doesn’t do much to help with the reality of working with it day-to-day.

I’ve written a whole bunch of articles on pluggable databases (listed here), but even then I think there is quite a bit of text for what in many cases is a feature that consists of a single statement. 🙂

I’ve recently been pushing out some videos on this stuff and I’ve got some more already recorded for release while I’m at OOW. Of course, the articles allow you to copy/paste your way through an example, but I think the videos give a more accurate representation of just how simple some of this stuff is from a functional perspective. If you are interested, all the multitenant stuff will be added to this playlist as it is released.

Cheers

Tim…

PDB Logging Clause… Again…

About 14 months ago I spotted a problem with the PDB Logging Clause. I opened an SR and several months later I got a patch, which unfortunately didn’t fix the issue, just altered the symptom somewhat. I wrote about that patch here.

Yesterday I got a new patch, which actually does fix the problem, so now the PDB Logging Clause works as documented!

I’ve updated the PDB Logging Clause article to reflect the change.

I realise it’s a small issue, with an easy workaround, but 14 months seems a bit excessive. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Adaptive Query Optimization in Oracle 12c : Ongoing Updates

I’ve said a number of times, the process of writing articles is part of an ongoing learning experience for me. A few days ago my personal tech editor (Jonathan Lewis) asked about a statement I made in the SQL Plan Directive article. On further investigation it turned out the sentence was a complete work of fiction on my part, based on my misunderstanding of something I read in the manual, as well as the assumption that everything that happens must be as a result of a new feature. 🙂

Anyway, the offending statement has been altered, but the conversation this generated resulted in new article about Automatic Column Group Detection.

The process also highlighted how difficult, at least for me, it is to know what is going on in the optimizer now. It wasn’t always straight forward before, but now with the assorted new optimizations, some beating others to the punch, it is even more difficult. There are a number of timing issues involved also. If a statement runs twice in quick succession, you might get a different sequence of events compared to having a longer gap between the first and second run of the statement. It’s maddening at times. I’m hoping Jonathan will put pen to paper about this, because I think he will do a better job of explaining the issues around the inter-dependencies better than I can.

Anyway, I will be doing another pass through this stuff over the coming days/weeks/months/years to make sure it is consistent with “my current understanding”. 🙂

Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 22/23 and Oracle 11gR2/12cR1

linux-tuxAs always, installations of Oracle server products on Fedora are not a great idea, as explained here.

I was reading some stuff about the Fedora 23 Alpha and realised Fedora 22 had passed me by. Not sure how I missed that. 🙂

Anyway, I did a run through of the usual play stuff.

While I was at it, I thought I would get the heads-up on Fedora 23 Alpha.

The F23 stuff will have to be revised once the final version is out, but I’m less likely to forget now. 🙂

I guess the only change in F22 upward that really affects me is the deprecation of YUM in F22 in favour of the DNF fork. For the most part, you just switch the command.

#This:
yum install my-package -y
yum groupinstall my-package-group -y
yum update -y

#Becomes:
dnf install my-package -y
dnf groupinstall  my-package-group -y
dnf group install  my-package-group -y
dnf update -y

This did cause one really annoying problem in F23 though. The “MATE Desktop” had a single documentation package that was causing a problem. Usually I would use the following.

yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop" -y --skip-broken

Unfortunately, DNF doesn’t support “–skip-broken”, so I was left to either manually install the pieces, or give up. I chose the latter and use LXDE instead. 🙂 F23 is an Alpha, so you expect issues, but DNF has been in since F22 and still no “–skip-broken”, which I find myself using a lot. Pity.

Cheers

Tim…

Emergency Monitoring, Real-Time ADDM, Compare Period ADDM, and Active Session History (ASH) Analytics

My recent dalliance with YouTube (141 subscribers and growing! 🙂 ) has left the blog feeling a little bit unloved of late, but then why write when you can waffle in the car? 🙂

Anyway, the 12c learning train keeps on rolling. I’ve recently put the following articles live.

These are all listed as 12c new features in the 1Z0-060 “Upgrade to Oracle Database 12c” OCP upgrade exam, which I find a bit odd. Two of them are EM12c features, not database features. The other two are existing EM12c features that are now available directly from the database, but I can’t see myself ever using them on the server when it is much easier to do it from Cloud Control. Whatever! 🙂

Getting close to the end of the OCP syllabus now… I’ll soon have to consider sitting the exam…

Cheers

Tim…

LATERAL Inline Views, CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY Joins in 12c

love-sqlI was looking for something in the New Features Manual and I had a total WTF moment when I saw this stuff.

If you look at the final section of the article, you can see in some cases these just get transformed to regular joins and outer joins, but there is certainly something else under the hood, as shown by the pipelined table function example.

I think it’s going to take me a long time before I think of using these in my regular SQL…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: The optimizer has used LATERAL inline views during some query transformations for some time, but they were not documented and therefore not supported for us to use directly until now. Thanks to Dominic Brooks and Sayan Malakshinov for the clarification.

Auditing Enhancements (Audit Policies and Unified Audit Trail) in Oracle Database 12c

security_image1_smallA little over a year ago I was at the BGOUG Spring Conference and I watched a session by Maja Veselica about auditing in Oracle Database 12c. At the time I noted that I really needed to take a look at this new functionality, as is was quite different to what had come before. Fast forward a year and I’ve finally got around to doing just that. 🙂

I’ve tried to keep the article quite light and fluffy. The Oracle documentation on this subject is really pretty good, so you should definitely invest some time reading it, but if you need a quick overview to get you started, my article might help. 🙂

My 12c learning experience continues…

Cheers

Tim…

Partitioning Enhancements in Oracle Database 12c Release 1

I was planning to cover this subject in a single article, but it got a bit bulky, so I split it down into 6 little articles.

I’ve also created a links page to bring them all together.

I guess you could call it a list of nice-to-haves, rather than something revolutionary, but I’m sure someone will come back to me saying one of them has changed their life! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…