Oracle 11g Database Enterprise Edition New Features

Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Features and Options Only Available to Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition

Here is a list of the features and options that can be found in the Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition.  This gives the manager an idea of what features best fit the needs of his/her company and can help in deciding whether the Enterprise Edition or the Standard Edition is the best choice for the company’s needs.

• Oracle Data Guard

- Redo Apply, SQL Apply, Snapshot Standby, Network Compression, Active Data Guard

• Rolling upgrades

• Fast-start selectable recovery time

• Online schema reorganization

• Flashback

- Table, Database, Transaction, Transaction Query, Data Archive

• Block-level media recovery

• Block change tracking for faster incremental backups

• Parallel backup and recovery

• Fast RMAN Compression (ZLIB)

• Point-in-time tablespace recovery

• Trial recovery

• Oracle Advanced and Label Security

• Virtual Private Database

• Fine grained auditing

• New results cache feature

• New Client Side Query Cache

• Change Management and Configuration Management Packs

• Diagnostic and Tuning Packs

• Duplexed backup sets

• Resource Manager

• SQL Plan Management

• Partitioning

• Data Mining

• Direct Load and OLTP Compression

• Bitmapped index and bitmapped join index

• Various Parallel operations

- Query, Statistics gathering, Index build, Index scan, Data Pump, Export/Import

• Data Pump Compression

• Export Transportable tablespace

• Materialized View Query Rewrite

• Asynchronous Change Data Capture

• Full Oracle Streams options

• Messaging Gateway

• Advanced Replication

• Connection Manager

• InfiniBand Support

• Oracle Spatial

Features and Options available to Oracle 11g Standard Edition

Here is a list of the features and options for the Standard Edition so that the manager has a comparison with the Enterprise Edition.

• Basic Standby Database (Manually managed)

• Online system changes

• Flashback Query

• Online Backup and Recovery

• Incremental Backup and Recovery

• Default RMAN Compression (BZIP2)

• Oracle Fail Safe (Windows only)

• Data Recovery Advisor

• Transparent Application Failover

• Real Application Clusters

• Oracle Clusterware

• Automatic Workload Management

• Encryption toolkit

• Java support

• Database Web services

• SQLJ

• JDBC drivers

• XML support in the database

• Xquery

• Objects and extensibility

• Various PL/SQL features

- Regular Expressions, Stored procedures, Triggers, Server pages, native compile

• Java Server Pages and Java native compilation

• Various Microsoft items

- Developer Tools for Visual Studio .Net, DTC support, Active Directory integration, ODP.Net, .Net stored procedures

• 64-bit Itanium support

• Globalization support

• Application Express

• SQL*Plus and SQL Developer

• Fast Lightweight Server Install

• Easy Client Install

• Oracle Enterprise Manager – Database Control

• Automatic

- memory management, storage management, undo management, statistics management

• RMAN

• Backup to Flash Recovery Area

• Server generated Alerts

• Application Tracing

• Resumable Space Allocation

• SQL Analytic functions

• Function-based indexes

• Basic Data Pump Export/Import

• Import Transportable Tablespace

• Star query transformation (b-tree only)

• Sample scan

• Summary Management – Materialized View creation and refresh

• Direct Path Load API

• External tables

• SQL Model

• Synchronous Change Data Capture

• Oracle Streams Apply only

• Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing

• Basic Replication

• Distributed queries/transactions

• Job Scheduler

• External procedures

• Generic connectivity

• Transparent Gateways

• Connection polling

• Oracle Locator

• Oracle Workspace Manager

• MultiMedia

• Oracle Text

• SecureFiles

• Database event triggers

• Various column operations

- drop, rename, constraint, virtual

• Amazing Invisible Indexes

• Index-organized table

• Instead-of triggers

• LOB support

• LogMiner

• Multiple block size support

• Temporary tables

That was a long list!  This information might save one’s company $50,000 in Oracle licensing costs.  For larger sites, it could even save the company millions of dollars.  The great thing about Oracle 11g Standard Edition is that it is easy to upgrade to Enterprise Edition when necessary.

Whether Standard Edition is an option or not, many enterprises are showing interest in major data or database consolidation. For example, dozens of instances residing on several hosts or servers are merged into a large database. With a powerful server platform, abundant memory, and ample processor resources, it is common to establish a very large database (VLDB) that can accumulate terabytes of data.  This license can be called scale-in.

Oracle VLDB has proven to be a good cost saving solution.  Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition offers dynamic parallel processing features that can offer significant performance time improvements.  This approach provides:

• Reduced TCO in terms of licensing, staffing, and consulting fees

• Improved availability with the focus on fewer databases

• Higher security

• Centralized backup and archive

RAC with Grid is an ideal solution to take advantage of these developments. RAC supports VLDB databases for data consolidation and large data warehousing databases. Even in a packaged application environment, as in SAP or PeopleSoft, there is a tendency towards consolidating the databases to provide lower cost and better administrative flexibility. 

With the power of processors today, reducing a corporation’s database server footprint to be a tenth of what it was is a real possibility.  Virtual machines are a big part of enterprise server consolidation efforts.  Oracle VM is a less known product in the Virtual Machine marketplace but is interesting because it is fully supported for various Oracle products.  See MOSC Doc 464754.1 for the latest information about RAC on Oracle VM.

Conclusion

Oracle RAC provides a scalable and highly available data storage platform.  Multi-instances and multiple nodes make RAC a powerful database platform. Most applications can use this multi-node clustered database without any code modification. This chapter also listed the options and features for both Oracle 11g Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition that helps one make a decision on which package is ideal for one’s situation.