Justifying a migration upgrade to Oracle 10g Oracle Upgrade Tips by Donald K. Burleson

Oracle 10g upgrade justification

By Donald K. Burleson (My qualifications)

There are many compelling reasons to migrate directly to Oracle 10g release 2.  Oracle 10g is very stable and there are many administrative and performance benefits to justify a migration to Oracle 10g.  My company is a leading provider of Oracle 10g upgrade support services and these are some common reasons that shops choose to move to Oracle 10g.

Justification of 10g upgrades for developers

Oracle developers will find themselves far more productive because of advancements in utilities that make developers more productive by automating the tedious components of Oracle systems development:

• SQL Developer tool - The 10g SQL Developer tool is a GUI which allows developers to quickly debug and optimize PL/SQL and SQL.
   

• Rapid application development - Oracle 10g introduces Oracle Application Express (Apex), a easy to use tool for rapid deployment of applications.  Apex is often used as a replacement for SQL*Forms and JDeveloper, and Apex can be learned in a 5 day class.  Apex allows developers to create online systems in a fraction of the time of SQL*Forms, and Apex applications can easily scale to support hundreds of screens and sophisticated business needs.
   

• Easy XML Publishing - Oracle 10g introduces easy XML Publisher, XML-DB and easy XML formatting utilities.
   

• Enhancements to developer tools - Oracle SQL*Forms and offers improved debugging utilities to make developers far more productive.
   

SQL and PL/SQL improvements

IT managers will see great improvements in the runtime performance of SQL and PL/SQL.

• Improved code performance - The Oracle kernel and PL/SQL have been re-written with shorter code paths, and a typical Oracle shops will see a 10%-30% performance improvement immediately after migration.  We also see the ability to compile PL/SQL and PL/SQL packages that are designed to improve PL/SQL performance.  Tests show that PL/SQL may 25% faster when migrating to Oracle10g.
   

• Improved SQL optimization - Improvements to the cost-based SQL optimizer will result in SQL execution with fewer trips to the database.
   

• Improved PL/SQL optimization - PL/SQL has been greatly improved and Oracle 10g can automatically rewrite existing PL/SQL to replace cumbersome row at a time context switches with far faster table-level bulk operations.  Most notable is the Oracle 10g PL/SQL performance optimization, where PL/SQL with cursor fetches can run 10x to 20x faster.
   

• Improved developer utilities - Oracle 10g contains advanced intelligent utilities that allow developers to quickly debug and diagnose SQL and PL/SQL problems.
   

Justification of 10g upgrades for the DBA

For the DBA we also see many compelling reasons for a 10g migration, centering around easier management and improved statistics collection and analysis:

• Improved stability - There are far less bugs in Oracle 10g and less bugs than in Oracle 9i.  The evolution of Oracle is a continuous release of upgrades and patches, and Oracle 10g has far less exposures than preceding releases.
   

• Higher reliability - Oracle has improved 10g continuous availability to ensure that mission critical database can be maintained without disturbing operations.
   

• Better security - Oracle has made a huge effort to improve security in 10g, and 10g is far less vulnerable to external attacks and 9i.
   

• Automated DBA management - Oracle 10g has automated many DBA tasks and offers automatic memory management, automated storage management, and ADDM, the automated database diagnostic monitor.
   

• Improved Tuning tools - Oracle has moved STATSPACK into the 10g kernel, and the Automatic Workload Repository allows for easy holistic tuning, using real-world workloads to ensure system-level optimization.  Oracle 10g also introduces the Automated Session History, a built-in tuning repository to aid in diagnosing production problems.
   

• Intelligent Advisors - Oracle 10g also provides the SQLAccess advisor and SQLTuning advisor which allows the DBA to optimizer queries empirically by testing against real-world workloads.
   

• Easier patch management - Oracle 10g introduces the Oracle configuration manager which allows seamless interfaces with Oracle MOSC.
   

• Improved partitioning - Oracle 10g partitioning allows for easier DBA management and the 10g partition-aware SQL will result in improved SQL performance.

Oracle 10g migration best practices

Oracle10g upgrades can be perilous because of the extensive kernel changes.  The SQL optimizer has been completely re-done and there are many undocumented parameters and configurations that are needed to ensure optimal performance in your server environment. 

If you miss a new parameter or forget a trivial configuration issue your Oracle 10g upgrade can be a disaster.  It is not uncommon to find performance degradation after a migration to Oracle 10g and many companies will engage experts who have experience with 10g upgrades.

• Oracle 10g upgrade support

• Oracle 10g new features training for the DBA

• Oracle 10g new features training for developers

 

Donald K. Burleson Qualifications

I possess a Masters degree in Business Administration from The University of New Mexico and I have more than 20 years experience of full-time work experience supporting mission-critical database systems.  I have worked for many years as an Adjunct Professor, teaching graduate-level school courses for several major universities including the University of New Mexico, Webster University and the State Universities of New York.

I have written five officially authorized books for Oracle Press and I am the author of more than 20 books on Oracle database management.  I have consulted for numerous Fortune 50 corporations, assisting with the architecture and tuning for some of the world's most complex and sophisticated Oracle deployments.  Donald K. Burleson Resume.

 

 

For details on justifying an Oracle 10g migration, see my book "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference".  You can buy it direct from the publisher for 30%-off and get instant access to the code depot of Oracle tuning scripts:

Here are some of my references on Oracle10g migration: