18c

I've recently came across an interesting observation I've not seen documented yet, so I'm publishing a simple example here to demonstrate the issue.

In principle it looks like that the efficiency of Bloom Filter operations are dependent on the cardinality estimates. This means that in particular cardinality under-estimates of the optimizer can make a dramatic difference how efficient a corresponding Bloom Filter operation based on such a cardinality estimate will work at runtime. Since Bloom Filters are crucial for efficient processing in particular when using Exadata or In Memory column store this can have significant impact on the performance of affected operations.

Chinar Aliyev has recently started to pick up on several of my blog posts regarding Parallel Execution and the corresponding new features introduced in Oracle 12c.

It is good to see that obviously Oracle has since then improved some of these and added new ones as well.

Here are some links to the corresponding posts:

New automatic Parallel Outer Join Null Handling in 18c

Improvements regarding automatic parallel distribution skew handling in 18c

Here’s an odd little change between Oracle versions that could have a stunning impact on the application performance if the thing that generates your client code happens to use an unlucky selection of constructs.  It’s possible to demonstrate the effect remarkably easily – you just have to describe a table, doing it lots of times to make it easy to see what’s happening.

I’m currently writing up a few blog pieces on indexing in the Oracle Autonomous Database environments, but I thought I’ll begin by introducing what exactly are Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Services and some of my initial thoughts, as there’s still some confusion on all this. Introduced by Uncle Larry at Oracle OpenWorld 2017, Oracle Autonomous […]

While investigating new options I discovered with dbca for the previous article I noticed that it’s now possible to use Oracle’s Database Creation Assistant (dbca) to create a physical standby database using the -createDuplicateDB flag.

I wanted to know how easily this can be done on my Oracle 18.5.0 system. I have 2 VMs, server3 and server4 running Oracle Linux 7.6. I created the primary database on server3. The database name is NCDB with the db_unique_name set to SITEA. I also use SITEA as the database SID to prevent confusion. My physical standby database with db_unique_name SITEB will reside on server4.

A few months ago Franck Pachot wrote about a recursive SQL statement that kept appearing in the library cache. I discovered the note today because I had just found a client site where the following statement suddenly appeared near the top of the “SQL ordered by Executions” section of their AWR reports after they had upgraded to 18c.

select domain# from sys.im_domain$ where objn = :1 and col# = :2

I found Franck’s article by the simple expedient of typing the entire query into a Google search – his note was the first hit on the list, and he had a convenient example (based on the SCOTT schema) to demonstrate the effect, so I built the tables from the schema and ran a simple test with extended SQL tracing (event 10046) enabled.

Up until – and including – Oracle 12.1 I always found it not-quite-so-straight-forward to create a new database using Database Creation Assistant (dbca) and configure it with Oracle Managed Files (OMF) on a file system in silent mode. I really like to use OMF in my lab databases as it saves me a lot of typing. I have also seen Oracle databases deployed in the cloud on file systems without ASM. So I was quite happy to see the syntax for dbca -silent -createDatabase was extended.

This post has been written using Oracle 18.4.0 on Linux.

Wow…it is nearly 4 years ago now that I wrote an article on connecting to the database via a wallet to avoid having to hard code passwords into script. That article is here:

https://connor-mcdonald.com/2015/09/21/connection-shortcuts-with-a-wallet/

So I went to do a similar exercise on my new 18c Windows database today, and to my surprise things went pear shaped at the very first step

Yes, I know it’s been awhile

Yes, I know people have been angry at the delay

But, can we put that behind us, and rejoice in the fact…that YES

It’s here!

Yes, 18c XE for Windows is now available.

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technologies/express-edition/downloads/index.html

Contrary to wild rumours on the internet, it was not a fear of the number 13 that led to a numbering jump from version 12c to version 18c. The jump was part of our new, more flexible release mechanism so that we can get fixes and enhancements to customers on a more frequent and predictable schedule. In a nutshell, smaller bundles of features and fixes, more frequently.

I won’t dwell on that – if you’re unfamiliar with the new strategy, the best place to start is  MOS Note 2285040.1, which has a description and a FAQ. But in terms of (as the saying goes) eating one’s own dog food, I downloaded the 18.5 release update which came out this week, and applied it to my 18.3 installation and I thought I’d share the process.